THE road accident on Sunday in which four young men lost their lives, is another grisly reminder of the ever-present, lethal danger for travellers on Karachi roads. These youngsters were in a car on Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan road (end of Mai Kolachi going towards Jinnah Bridge) when a speeding oil tanker coming in from the wrong side on a one way road crashed into them, overturning their car. It was learned that the oil tanker was actually fleeing a police mobile which was chasing the tanker following an earlier complaint lodged at 115 by another car which had been hit by the same oil tanker on Mauripur road.

With escape being the tanker driver’s prime objective, he apparently disregarded all caution and – the road being horribly dug up on both sides – lost control, ramming into the oncoming car and resulting in the four deaths.

Reports of speeding buses, trucks, trailers, tankers and dumpers claiming innocent lives are now a daily affair. Almost all news items have similar stories to tell: A mother of seven children was hit by a minibus, and died on the spot. She was only 38 and was declared dead on arrival at the hospital; A boy was crushed under the wheels of a recklessly driven bus. He was returning from school and was only 14 years old. He was pronounced dead on arrival; Two persons riding on a motorbike were hit by a trailer and one of them sustained severe injuries. He was 35, a father of two and was pronounced dead on arrival; A pedestrian was knocked down by a speeding bus. He was 45 and was also pronounced dead on arrival.

These are but a few recorded ‘deaths by accident’ of the nearly 600 such incidents that occur annually according to statistics. And in all cases the last verdict is the same; the driver escaped, abandoning the vehicle.

The police assigned the duties of regulating and managing traffic on city’s roads, are never willing to take any responsibility in this regard. The DIG traffic says there is very little which actually comes under his jurisdiction. “We can’t even put up road signs and signals on our own initiative. It is for the road’s ‘owning authority’ to do that,” he says. All management issues of the road which include lane demarcations, detouring and rerouting procedures come under the authority which owns the road, be it the city government, the Cantonment or the DHA.

But then what of the speed offenders? Surely these can be nabbed. And why are bus drivers with a criminal record allowed to go back on the road? It is the traffic police who are responsible for the issuance and cancellation of driving licences. Which means that with the ‘right contacts’ the bus and tanker owners all comprising a large and very dangerous mafia have many avenues open to get their drivers freed and back on the road to carry on their offensive driving.

The traffic police is also responsible for the issuance/cancellation of ‘Fitness certificates’ to all the commercial vehicles playing on the city’s road. In addition to it the police have the authority to impound any vehicle under section 279 of PPC on the charge of reckless driving.

With almost 500 new cars being registered daily in Karachi alone, the future is becoming bleaker by the minute. And when road revamping or construction is taking place, even then the traffic police are never brought in by the authorities handling the project to properly organize alternate routing procedures. Constables are only posted at given points to manually assume traffic control.

According to a police report, almost 500 have been reported killed in traffic accidents so far this year. Imagine the many innocent souls who left their homes for their daily chores and never returned because someone broke a traffic law.

Madeeha Sami, the young student of Sir Syed University who was trampled to death outside the institute by a speeding bus just days before Eid last month, is a recent tragic case of just such lawlessness. In any case, the traffic police must take the responsibility of ensuring adherence to the rules and to pursue violators, specially drivers of heavy vehicles and buses. It is also the government’s job – provincial and federal – to ensure that serious traffic violators are charged with criminal offence and their licences suspended. The local government’s initiative of organizing traffic seminars for media promotions is beginning to be exposed as a totally hollow exercise. Earnest measures must be taken for a drastic change and these must begin from the top.

Using ‘official or high level contacts’ which allow traffic outlaws to go unpunished, should also be made an unpardonable crime even for those who oblige with such favours.

THERE’S another London terrorist alert in full swing as I write this article. Twenty-four-hour cable news is blaring in the next office, bringing news that Whitehall has been closed to traffic. A colleague pops her head around the door. “Whitehall’s closed.” No, wait a moment. The same head appears at the door. “They’ve reopened Whitehall,” she says. And I sigh, wistfully, for the good old days when deadlines mattered.

Deadlines, they were a very movable feast. But at least they gave working days some form and discipline. You needed to pause and summon your thoughts when they came around; you needed to think.

It isn’t quite like that any longer. When — as more and more frequently happens — write for a website, there are no constraints on length or time. Just send as much as you can, pronto, and keep updating through the evening. Publication is a finger on a keyboard tapping continuously, not an industrial process. Cable TV seems exactly the same, using tongues not fingers.

In many ways you could call that progress the wonder of instantaneous communication. When bombs go off the reader rush to the Internet is palpable. Tell us what’s happening now, this second! And TV has developed a habit of signalling “very important developments” by breaking into existing programming with minute-by-minute coverage. The wonder of the mobile phone allows ordinary members of the public who witness disaster to call on the spot with eyewitness reports. The additional wonder of the mobile is a shower of pictures of bomb debris, screaming victims or general mayhem. Let Joe Public be your guide.

What is there to worry about here? Very little, at least in theory. If journalists aren’t entirely trusted by their readers or viewers — a constant, dreary refrain — then turning those readers or viewers into surrogate journalists for a day may be a wonderful antidote. We always said we wanted to be ordinary with no special privileges or status. Now we’re exactly that. Trust is all around, and the chance of finding a “reporter” at hand when news breaks is hugely increased. More must mean better in every way.

But then, in mid-flow, there is a glitch. Twentyfour-hour TV executives make it fiercely clear that they don’t put material on screen without careful checking. The journalism filter still exists. Yet if you step back for a second and examine content not form, you know there’s a hole in that argument. The trouble with continuous news is that it can’t separate the gold from the dross. It is as good or as bad as the last witness to flit across the screen, the last press release from some authority or other, the last swiftly shredded message.

Nothing I’m saying here diminishes the job that instant TV or instant Internet players do when a crisis happens. They’re part of our reaction to it, an inescapable and necessary resource. However, they can’t do cool analysis, context or expert assessment. They’re not hot on meaning among a babble of voices. Their job is to tell you what went on, or what seemed to be going on till the smoke cleared.

They can’t “stand by” their reports because such reports, in human life and human confusion, are liable to change. They can’t raise deeper questions because deep down they just have to keep moving along.

And there are stickier issues here, too. Do readers truly trust the reports and pictures that other readers phone in because they’re first hand and unmediated, or do they blame the medium when the message isn’t right Where, from 9/11 on, is rationality in the chaos of bombs and confusion

The lack of a deadline, in short, also involves a lack of anything much below the surface; a relentless chase after some pack rather than a search for meaning or point. Yet there’s a mortal deficiency hidden in this equation, one almost eerily designed to go with terrorism coverage. What, after all, are the terrorists trying to do. To scare, alarm, send shock waves coursing through society. They take the normal patterns of life and seek to disrupt them. They want us to lose our bearings. And there, precisely, is the difficulty with responding on the double, hour after hour, for that, in turn, is normality tossed away in the heat of the moment.

Once the rush of early events subsides, it’s clearly important to maintain momentum. Events seem to pile on top of each other. Who needs calm when frenzy is so much more compulsive

There’s a change in behaviour here, one we have to start to come to grips with. What, after all, is freedom but the time and space to think ? Where are still, small voices in the melee? I used to curse when the clock came around; when the thinking stopped and decisions had to be made. But better the curse of the deadline than the curse of the endless treadmill.

—Courtesy The Global Journalist

(Peter Preston is editorial director of the Guardian Media Group).