ABU DHABI // Driving home the dramatic consequences of traffic accidents to residents is a crucial factor in improving safety on the UAE's streets, road safety organisations said yesterday. Some spoke out against a "passive acceptance" of accidents and urged public campaigns with graphic images of the injuries that occur in collisions.
Nisrine Sfeir, the public awareness manager with the Emirates Foundation, one of the founders of the Salama initiative, whose safety campaign focuses on the "guilt factor" of traffic accidents, urged people to consider the wider implications of each road death. "Those victims of car crashes are not stand-alone people - they have families, they have friends, they have loved ones." she said. "Each of those losses is much greater than the number of people who died on the roads."
Ms Sfeir's comments came as a survey for The National showed that 281 out of 408 people had witnessed an accident in the past three months. The results also suggest divisions among ethnic groups in attitudes towards certain types of driving offences. For example, 76 per cent of westerners believe allowing young children to ride in the front seat of a vehicle is an extremely serious offence - a view shared by 64 per cent of Emiratis, 60 per cent of Asians and only 54 per cent of Arab expatriates.
The Abu Dhabi Police media department said the report underlined the fact that drivers and pedestrians were aware of the need to improve safety. Excessive speed and other "dangerous and illegal practices" contributed to accidents, said Col Hamad al Shamsi, director of the police traffic and patrols department. "We welcome the acknowledgment that the black-points system has led to an improvement in driving standards and can reassure the public that Abu Dhabi Police will continue to work tirelessly to make the roads safer for drivers and pedestrians," he said. "We will see real change only with the help and support of all members of our community."
Bernadette Bhacker, a Dubai-based British lawyer and founder and director of Sustainability al Mustadaama, an Oman-based organisation that campaigns for road safety and has an office in Dubai, said the survey displayed a "knowledge gap" between different nationalities. The results of the western expatriates reflected 35 years of road-safety education, plus a much more stringent driving test, including knowledge of a motorway code.
"It's because of that knowledge gap that you have a lower risk perception on the part of the other nationalities," she said. She said the UAE and other Gulf countries were repeating the pattern experienced by rapidly motorising high-income countries in the 1970s, when death on the roads killed one in every 3,000 people. "The trend was reversed only when people, including media, victims and public personalities, began to react and to speak out against passive acceptance of the carnage," she said.
Taking children to hospitals to see the victims of accidents and using print, TV and radio spots with strong imagery were effective ways to get the message across, Ms Bhacker added. In the UK, for instance, the Department for Transport's Think! campaign uses graphic posters and videos to show the effects of car crashes. In one video from 2008, a driver is shown being killed in a head-on collision, demonstrating that because he was not wearing a seat belt, his internal organs continued travelling forward until they hit his rib cage.
Education efforts had to be backed up by enforcement and strong engineering measures, Ms Sfeir said. Salama, a public-private endeavour, was formed in November. Emirates Foundation, Shell and the Emirates Driving Company are founding members, with the support of the UAE Ministry of Interior and Health Authority-Abu Dhabi. One of the group's posters shows three friends having a barbecue - but one of the friends is just a yellow outline, illustrating that he has been killed in a high-speed accident.
"It's one of those Kodak moments, except there is an important person missing in there," Ms Sfeir said. "Our approach was to go emotional, building on the guilt. But also to give those tangible, rational reasons. "So if we're talking about speed, we are telling them that by speeding at 120kph in a 60kph zone, you are 15 times more likely to die in a car crash." Salama intends to focus on different segments of society to deliver more targeted campaigns to different nationalities and age groups.
mchung@thenational.ae
