The head-on crash between a bus and a lorry on Saturday morning in the Ab-Ali road, about 50 kilometers north of Tehran, and a similar one between a bus and tanker lorry in the Chabahar-Iranshahr road in Sistan Baluchistan province just a few days before should come as an alarming and wakeup call for the bodies concerned with the transportation system across the country.

Even though police has taken great steps for reducing road accidents and the Transport Ministry have constructed hundreds of kilometers of inter-city highways and put right some dangerous spots, the situation is still too far away from an ideal one.
For example, even though the bus driver’s sleepiness is blamed for the accident on the Ab-Ali road, the place, where the crash has happened, is prone for similar crashes as the road is too steep and narrow for safe motoring and it is not the first time that such a tragic accident has happened there.
But what seems more urgent is that bus drivers should get special training both in terms of safe driving and responsibility. Bus drivers should undergo regular medical tests to ensure that they are in a good physical and psychological shape.
Moreover, there should be a limitation on how many hours, or at what hours, a motorist can drive during a day or week. Now there is a limitation for bus drivers in this regard, but unfortunately there is no such a rule for truck drivers and this has been a major cause of fatal accidents on inter-city roads especially at night times.
We should not forget that the deaths caused by road accidents are among the worst kinds of tragedies in modern life as they happen unexpectedly with a durable traumatic hysteria for the bereaved families.