The traffic accident that claimed the lives of 24 people who were on board a “secret” transport vehicle in the Azilal province, yesterday, Sunday, brought to the fore the problems in which the dual transport sector is floundering, despite the legal measures taken by the government to regulate it.
Although secret transportation solves a number of problems that Moroccans living in remote areas suffer from, it, on the other hand, poses major problems in terms of road safety, as cars designated for this purpose are shipped in excess of their capacity, whether in terms of the number of passengers or load.
According to the terms of the book of double transport endurance in the rural world, the maximum number of seats for the vehicle must range between 9 and 15 seats, without counting the driver’s seat, as stipulated in Article 9 of the aforementioned legal text, but this item is not applied by many workers in This sector, as examined by the electronic newspaper Hespress.
In the market of Ain Jemaa, on the outskirts of the city of Meknes, similar to what is found in other regions, the items contained in the book of transportation campaigns disappear in the rural world, where people are installed randomly in the hollow of the wagons.
From this village market, the owners of small cars intended for transportation load the vehicles beyond their capacity. In the front seats, which are supposed to ride one or two people, three people are installed, in addition to the driver.
These scenes abound in the weekly markets and in the seasons, and Hespress also witnessed in the “Sidi Amara” season the districts of the city of Safi, which is organized in the month of October, where no consideration is given to the number of passengers allowed by the double transport vehicles, but rather they are stacked inside Cart randomly even though it’s against the law.
According to the book of transportation tolerances in the rural world, “it is forbidden to accept and transport passengers on the roof of the vehicle, and it is also forbidden to place additional seats in the middle aisle of the vehicle.”
Hassan al-Shahlawi, head of the International Observatory for Media and Human Rights in the Beni Mellal-Khenifra region, considered that the legal measures that were put in place to legalize transportation in the rural world must be accompanied by practical measures, foremost of which is monitoring the extent of compliance of those concerned with the measures taken, and providing valid road routes.
Al-Shahlawi said, in a statement to Hespress, that the road in which the tragedy occurred that claimed the lives of 24 people in the Azilal region did not have side barriers, although it is a mountainous road with dangerous turns, and it is not well paved.
In response to a question about how to reconcile the provision of sufficient means of transportation for those living in the rural world, on the one hand, and obligating workers in this sector to respect the law, on the other hand, despite the fact that citizens are forced to take any vehicle due to the lack of means of transportation, the human rights activist said The same: “There must be monitoring of the extent to which the permitted number of passengers is respected, so that if an accident occurs, its losses will be less,” and he highlighted that the greater the number of passengers, the greater the volume of goods, and thus the car’s load increases, which leads to the possibility of a traffic accident.
According to data issued by the Ministry of Transport and Logistics, the number of dual transport licenses that have been issued in Morocco amounts to 3,638, of which 1,380 are in operation.
And the Minister of Transport and Logistics, Mohamed Abdel Jalil, had previously acknowledged the inability of dual transport to solve the transportation problem in the rural world, considering that the solution to this problem requires building on advanced regionalization, and assigning the task to elected councils.