Road safety poses its own kind of threat in the UAE

More than 1.3 million deaths globally each year are caused by traffic accidents annually and experts are expecting the number to surge.

ABU DHABI // Although road safety is not usually considered a state security threat, experts said crashes were one of the biggest killers in the world, with 1.3 million deaths globally every year.

International experts said they had witnessed poor driving in the UAE, including speeding, lack of seat belts and use of mobile phones.

“Should this trend continue, the UN predicts that figure to grow to 1.9 million deaths in the next decade which will be a really difficult situation,” said Dr Michiel van Ratingen, the secretary general of the European New Car Assessment Programme in Belgium.

“Although factors in road safety are common around the world, each country faces its individual challenges and, for the UAE, I saw a good road network but I also saw people speeding and not wearing a seat belt, so each country must address its own priorities in road safety.”

He said road fatalities were predicted to surge globally.

“We speak of epidemics because of emerging regions around the world such as China, India and South America that are starting to increase the use of motor vehicles.”

The UN Decade of Action called on governments to try to save at least five million lives by acting by 2020.

“That means in practical terms that you have 50 million injured people saved and three trillion in social costs saved so that’s something worth fighting for,” said Dr van Ratingen.

The initiative issued a plan with guidelines for each government to consider, with five main factors needed in all countries to address casualties. They include building management capacities, safer roads, safer vehicles, encouraging safer behaviour by users and improving post-crash care in hospitals.

“Quite a big part of the world still has no vehicle-safety regulations at all,” Dr van Ratingen said. “Car manufacturers can sell whatever they want.”

He said new technologies could be beneficial in the UAE.

“Promoting safer vehicles is ultimately the best thing to do but road infrastructure is also a very important item,” he said. “Fifty per cent of all fatalities occur on only 10 per cent of roads around the world, so if you want to address that 10 per cent with some investment, the cost benefit will be extremely positive for the country.”

Britta Lange, the principal road safety scientist at the Transport Research Laboratory in the UAE, said road crashes especially affected the younger generation.

“A Lancet Gulf-specific study published this year found that road crashes were the leading cause of healthy life years lost in high-income countries in the Gulf including the UAE in 2010 for males,” she said. “For females, it was the ninth cause of life lost. We can’t afford losing the country’s human potential to something as mundane as road crashes.”

She said UAE health authorities found that 63 per cent of deaths among children under 14 were attributable to traffic accidents. The global average is 22.3 per cent.

“This is a cause for concern,” Ms Lange said. “For Abu Dhabi, a peak in mortality rates for the 15 to 24-year-olds means we have to focus our efforts on the young.”

In comparison with the rest of the region, the UAE performed well in fatality rates, but it was still far from world leaders such as the UK and Sweden.

Although there have been fewer traffic fatalities recently, Ms Lange cited the need for additional data to better target counter measures.

“There is currently no official yearly publication of crashes so we can’t capture trends over time,” she said. “We need to better understand what works and build a comprehensive picture of what’s happening and where.”

She called for a federal UAE Road Safety Strategy that would be centrally led.

“Research shows that road-user behaviour is a dominant factor in accidents, so targeting improvement of driver behaviour seems like the right thing to do.”