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| Sunday, 17 November 2002 |
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Vehicles on roads hit new high by CAROL ALOYSIUS The number of vehicles on the roads has escalated to unprecedented levels over the past decade, with a new high record for vehicle registrations last year. "The largest number of applications for registration of vehicles last year came from the Western Province", a spokesman for the Motor Traffic Department, Western Province, told the 'Sunday Observer'. One third of all the vehicles registered in 2001 were from the Western Province". In 1991, a total of 904,373 vehicles were registered with the Motor traffic Department islandwide. A decade later in 2001 the number had doubled to 1,778,694.With so many new vehicles being added onto our roads every year, the chances are that the number of road accidents will also increase sharply due to over congestion, poor road conditions and bad driving, Motor Traffic Department sources say." Something must be done to ease this overload of traffic on the roads or else it will be impossible to drive on our roads, besides jeopardising the lives of pedestrians as well", a spokesman said. Meanwhile, along with the increase vehicle registrations , the demand for revenue licences has also escalated. The thirty eight Divisional Secretariat offices of the Western Province last year, issued a total of 521,825 revenue licences compared with 229,743 new licences issued in 1991, raking in a tidy sum of Rs. 876 million as against Rs. 315 million at the beginning of 1991. "This is in spite of the revenue remaining the same over the past decade", Department sources said. Predictably, Colombo city registered the highest number of applications for revenue licences - 174,552 in 2001. On an average, the Motor Traffic Department, Western Province, issues around 1000 licences every day. So is the Department able to cope with this rising demand for its services? "Yes", says Mr G. Somapala Silva, Commissioner, Motor Traffic Department, Western Province." In fact we no longer have long queues and people waiting for hours on end to collect their licences as in previous years. This is mainly due to our computerised facility. The Head office has been fully computerised since 2001 enabling our staff to work much faster and more accurately as well". To date, eleven computers have been given to the other Divisional Secretariats of the Western Province to facilitate their work. All the other Divisional Secretariats are expected to be fully computerised by next year end. "They will be linked to the Head Office in Colombo so that we can get a feed-back quickly", the Commissioner said. Under the decentralised functions of the Head Office based in Colombo, only licences for vehicles in Colombo city are issued by the Head office. All other licences are issued by the 38 Divisional Secretariats in Gampaha, and Kalutara. |
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