The latest July data from the Road Safety Foundation (RSF) brought no surprises, only a familiar but tragic reality.
The organization counted 416 people killed and 629 injured in 458 crashes across Bangladesh. Coming right after June's toll of 438, the country lost 854 lives in just two months.
Yet, these shocking figures caused barely a ripple in the national conversation.
Somewhere inside those two months, at a United Nations high-level meeting on road safety in July, Bangladesh restated its commitments on halving road deaths and injuries by 2030 and enacting a comprehensive road safety law by December 2027.
The pledge was made abroad while the July toll was accumulating at home.
Around the time the March Eid-rush was filling our highways, a smaller and far less dramatic vehicle arrived in Singapore.
It is a 16-seater electric bus, studded with cameras and sensors that give it a complete 360-degree view of its surroundings. It has no steering wheel, no pedals, and no human driver who can lose patience, experience fatigue, or take a reckless move to overtake a rival on a blind curve.
Land Transport Authority (LTA) received the first of six autonomous buses that will enter public service as part of a three-year pilot in mid-2026. Before the bus touches a public road, it will be put through rigorous closed-circuit testing, a stark contrast to the untested, unfit vehicles routinely deployed on Bangladeshi highways.
The price of a deadly status quo
The contrast with our own roads is not subtle. According to RSF, at least 274 people were killed and over 1,500 injured in 342 accidents during the 10-day Eid-ul-Fitr travel window from March 16 to 26.
The deadliest single incident occurred when a passenger bus lost control and plunged into the Padma River from a pontoon at the Daulatdia ferry ghat, claiming 26 lives.
A mail train rammed into a passenger bus after sleeping gatekeepers failed to lower the security barriers, killing 12 more at a level crossing in Comilla.
By the end of March, the toll had climbed to 532 deaths and 2,221 injuries across 576 accidents during that month alone.
The fatalities continued unabated into April 2026, which recorded 404 deaths and 709 injuries from 463 crashes. This grim period seamlessly transitioned into the next holiday season.
During the 13-day Eid-ul-Adha travel period from May 21 to June 2, 2026, the country witnessed another wave of carnage. RSF reported 281 fatalities and 837 injuries in 292 road accidents nationwide during this rush, with motorcycles proving to be the deadliest mode of transport, accounting for 124 of those deaths.
Among the most devastating of these tragedies was an incident on May 25 in Tangail's Kalihati Upazila, where an overloaded cargo truck illegally carrying homebound passengers under a tarpaulin cover overturned into a roadside ditch, crushing 15 labourers to death.
These occurrences were far from unusual; they were the predictable outcomes of a system that has failed to protect people year after year, Eid after Eid.
Then the festivals ended, and the numbers did not move. That is the part worth sitting with. June and July carried no holiday rush and no seasonal excuse and still produced 854 deaths between them.
In July, motorcycle crashes killed 138 people, just over a third of the total. Pedestrians accounted for another 106. National highways, the stretches built for speed and supposedly the best engineered, hosted 169 of the month’s crashes. Loss of vehicle control was again the single largest cause.
A separate count published in late July, days before the eighth anniversary of the 2018 student road safety movement, found that 7,364 students had been killed on the roads between 2019 and June this year, more than 15% of all road deaths in that period.
Of those, 391 died in the first six months of 2026. The children who marched for safer roads in 2018 have been replaced on the casualty lists by children who were too young to march.
The overall picture is grim, with the RSF’s 2025 Eid datahighlighting the specific catalysts of the crisis. Loss of control caused 44% of accidents, and head-on collisions made up 26%.
Motorcycles, which quadrupled from 1.5 million to over six million in a decade, accounted for more than 42% of all Eid fatalities.
Ultimately, behind almost every statistic lies an avoidable human error: An exhausted driver racing against the clock on a blind curve, or a desperate motorcyclist riding without a license or a helmet.
What is the real count?
There is a fundamental failure sitting underneath all of this. Bangladesh, it seems, cannot accurately track its own road fatalities.
For 2025, the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) recorded 5,490 deaths and called it the highest annual figure on record.
RSF, working from media reports, counted more than 7,300.
The Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity put it at 9,111.
The World Health Organization, using modelled estimates, once placed the toll for a single earlier year at close to 32,000 while local counts for that same year sat below 8,000.
These are not variations at the margin. Between the lowest and the highest domestic count sits a gap larger than the entire annual road death toll of many if not most countries.
An agency cannot target what it cannot measure. Blackspot identification, budget allocation, and any honest test of whether a policy worked all rest on a number the state does not reliably possess.
Singapore will monitor six autonomous buses in real time and judge them against a defined standard. We cannot say within several thousand how many of our own citizens died last year, and no institution carries an obligation to reconcile the difference.
Dr Sabbir Ahmad, a tech executive with global experience in digital connectivity, sustainable infrastructure and energy, now shaping Bangladesh's semiconductor landscape as the CEO of Silicon Array Ltd. Email: [email protected].
