The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has called on commercial road transport operators to fully embrace and cooperate with the authority to successfully operationalise the electronic registration (e-registration) of road transport service providers by next month.
At an engagement with 47 commercial road transport operators in the country, the acting Director-General of the NRSA, David Osafo Adonteng, said “it is commendable that already some of the transport service providers have taken the initiative to automate their systems ahead of the authority’s digitalisation exercise”.
The engagement last Thursday in Accra was to sensitise the transport service providers to the exercise and give them details of the components and the benefits to the sector and the economy in general.
Known as the TransportGhana, launched last month, it has eight features, including e-registration and licensing of transport operations; electronic ticketing and cashless systems; departure control and roadside assistance, also known as the i-locator.
The rest are e-driver training monitoring; e-passenger manifest; e-vehicle tracking; citizen reporting and road safety watch.
The project, intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of commercial road transport services in the country, is also expected to help minimise road traffic casualties by at least 50 per cent by the year 2030.
The initiative is part of the NRSA’s mandate to sanitise the road transport sector through the launching of the TransportGhana initiative last month.
The National Road Safety Regulation L.I. 2468 of 2022 mandates the authority to, among other things, set in motion an e-registration exercise to bring together all road transport service providers through the TransportGhana initiative.
TransportGhana is to transform commercial road transport services from manual to technology, based on automation/digitalisation of commercial road transport.
The acting director-general of the NRSA said the project aligned with the country’s road safety management to the government’s policy to digitise all sectors of the national economy.
The operators at the meeting included the Intercity STC, the Metro Mass Transit Limited, the Ghana Road Transport Coordinating Council (GRTCC), the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU) and the Progressive Transport Owners Association (PROTOA).
Others are the OA Transport Services, the Great Imperial Transport Services, the Concerned Transport, the Royal VVIP, the Tiger Transport and the Chisco Transport, Ghana.
Mr Adonteng commended 10 commercial road transport service providers for automating their systems to facilitate their integration into the national electronic system by March.
They include the GPRTU, PROTOA, Ayalolo, OA and VVIP transport services.
He said the meeting with the service providers would also ensure that individual members of the various transport unions were taken through the registration processes and how it would be operationalised next month.
Presentation on registration
The Director, Regulation, Inspection and Compliance of the NRSA, Kwame Koduah Atuahene, took the transport operators through the e-registration processes and the NRSA 2024 Action Plan.
The plan, he said, included registration of regulated entities as a legal mandate, pre-trip operational inspections, electronic registration, as well as inspections and compliance actions.
Mr Atuahene explained that the exercise came with no cost to beneficiaries but when the door on the opportunity given was later shut down then it would come at a cost to those who wanted the services.
The 2023 safety ratings for inter-city transport operations were also discussed at the meeting.
Transport operators
A number of the transport operators, including the Managing Director of the Chisco Transport Ghana, Valentine Ogege, the General Secretary of the Tiger Transport Services, Emmanuel Pink Danquah, and a commercial bus driver, Agyeman Badu, said the new initiative being introduced by the NRSA would ultimately help to sanitise the transport sector and further reduce road crashes to the barest minimum.
They were, however, worried about whether or not the NRSA had the capacity to deliver on the mandate as required by law, considering the limited number of their staff and other logistical constraints.
They raised concerns about the indiscriminate parking of faulty heavy-duty trucks on highways, as well as the inability of the Ghana Highway Authority to fix potholes on the roads which were both contributors to several crashes.