Lack of concentration could prove to be a costly affair for UAE drivers

Not paying proper attention to one's surroundings while driving is the main cause of road accidents, but it can be easily fixed.

Drivers in the UAE must pay more attention to avoid accidents. Mike Young / The National

Last weekend, while driving around Dubai Media City, it happened. Again. A driver pulled out in front of me, without even checking left or right, causing me to take evasive action, lean on my horn and shout really uncharitable things in his general direction. If I had been paying as little attention as he had to my surroundings, I’d now be on the phone to my car insurers rather than writing this column.

Driving standards here are generally poor – you don’t need me or anyone else to tell you that, you just need to look around you on any given road, on any given day. And the example I offer above is just one of the dozens of such scenarios we are all faced with each day.

Is there a cure to this [often literally] crippling ailment? Or should we all resign ourselves to wondering every time we strap ourselves into our cars, whether this journey will be “the one” when we are unwittingly involved in a serious accident or worse?

There are, of course, many factors contributing to the poor standards of driving we all see, but not paying attention to one’s surroundings has to be one of the most influential.

And the man who pulled out right in front of me as I navigated that tight roundabout on a sleepy Saturday afternoon probably even now has no idea why I felt it necessary to sound my horn. He was obviously somewhere else entirely, but the next time he makes such a move, who knows what might happen?

It was coincidental that this week a press release reached my inbox from the UK’s Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) – a respected body of professionals whose aim is to improve the standards of driving in the British Isles. And the headline of this press release struck a chord: “More than 30,000 road accidents a year caused by drivers ‘failing to look properly’”, it screamed in capital letters.

The IAM had put in a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Transport and police statistics were forthcoming. They made for rather unsettling reading, demonstrating that in 2013, two combined factors resulted in a shocking number of road accidents – “failure to look properly” and “failure to judge another person’s path or speed”, which together accounted for 13,299 accidents, or seven per cent of the total that year.

Next up was ‘failure to look properly’ combined with ‘carelessness or recklessness’, or ‘judged to be in a hurry’. These totalled 9,132 accidents, or five per cent of the total. The third was “failure to judge another driver’s path or speed”, combined with “carelessness or recklessness”, or “judged to be in a hurry”. Together, these were considered to be a causation factor in 4,339 accidents, or two per cent of the total. And so it went on, but by now you get the picture, I’m sure.

“These figures show conclusively that simple human errors continue to cause the majority of accidents,” said the IAM chief executive officer Sarah Sillars. “Drivers cannot blame something or someone else for a collision happening, it is down to every one of us to make a difference.

“The message is clear,” she continued, “that drivers must apply their full attention to driving – you simply cannot do two things at the same time if one of them is driving”.

She’s absolutely right, there’s no denying it. And perhaps, because we are a relatively compact society here, we get to see more accidents and near-misses most of the time. But the simple fact of the matter is that we don’t pay enough attention to what’s going on around us.

When I was in school, we had it drummed into us that when about to cross the road as pedestrians, we had to do three things first: stop, look and listen. If we were to heed that advice inside our cars as well as outside, just think what a difference it could make – how much stress, hardship, insurance costs and, yes, lives, could be saved. It’s not too much to ask, is it?