Lack of lane discipline biggest bug bear on UAE roads

Fraser M Martin contends that the main cause of accidents in the UAE is a lack of lane discipline and a failure to understand, in some cases, why there are lanes and what they are for.

Traffic on Sheikh Zayed road in Dubai. Pawan Singh / The National

It has been said that it is not the speed that kills — it is the sudden stop that gets you. And it is fairly scientifically proven that the faster you are travelling, the less time you will spend in an area of danger, so, as a general observation, the shocking traffic accident statistics in the GCC are probably not, as everyone would have us believe, the result of excessive speeds.

Our speed limits in UAE, as with other Gulf countries and indeed most of the rest of the world, are about right for the types of road they are posted on. On a freeway or multi-lane motorway, 120 kph is not unreasonable and 40 kph is quite enough in a built-up area around a school or shopping centre. In most cases, you only read about “excessive” speed when there is an accident, and then it is usually as a justification for why it took place.

One never reads about those who blast all the way to the Saudi border or over the mountains to Fujairah at well above the posted limits — it happens every day and it largely all goes without incident, so it cannot be the speed itself that is causing the real problem. I contend that the main cause of accidents is a lack of lane discipline and a failure to understand, in some cases, why there are lanes and what they are for.

Let’s get one thing sorted: there are no fast lanes and no slow lanes, and there are no lanes reserved for lorries. There are overtaking lanes and there are lanes to which lorries are prohibited access. There are lanes which should be used to access slip roads and those which should be used to build up speed before entering a lane in which traffic is moving more quickly.

That’s it.

No “fast tracks”, no bus lanes (except in some cities) and no “slow lanes”, especially in the middle of the tarmac. The hard shoulders on the right are for emergencies, the ones on the left for emergency vehicles. The ones marked by signs for “No Trucks” mean that lorries are not allowed to use them, no matter how quickly they are moving — they do not mean that cars cannot use them. And if you take the trouble to read the signs, you will see that all slip roads and major junctions are marked both for direction and distance. There is therefore no excuse for darting across four lanes to get into a slip road.

On lesser roads where there are roundabouts, the left lane is for turning left, the middle lane is for left or straight on, and the right lane is for straight on or turning right. Try drawing that on a piece of paper and you’ll see that if we all stuck to that, as we are supposed to, accidents on roundabouts would cease overnight. Likewise traffic light junctions.

The bottom line is that what we need is more and better policing. What the police forces do at the moment is laudable given the conditions in which they have to work, but we need to start issuing fines to and withdrawing licences from people who think it is all right to drive down a slip road onto a motorway at 60 kph and swing straight out to Lane 3.

We need to have enough police to stop people and explain why sitting at 80 kph on a motorway in the middle of a six-lane blacktop is not only unsafe, but unacceptable. We need to impound the car of the guy who thinks his time is more valuable than anyone else’s when he thunders down the outer hard shoulder in a traffic jam. And we need a procedure whereby reporting people who do take everyone else on the road as no more than nuisance value to their individual progress, get the notice of the police.

In motor racing, there is a saying: if you can drive smoothly, consistently and well, the speed will look after itself. Needless to say, I am not advocating motor racing on public roads, but the principles are correct, and if we could get even 10 per cent of current drivers to consistently drive more smoothly and observe the rules, on pain of heavy fines or vehicles being impounded if that’s what it takes, the terrible costs in both life and money will be reduced.

* Fraiser M Martin