'Traffic experts' take to street

Saaed patrol officers Gamel Saleh Naji and Ahmed Mubarak attend the scene of car accident in Mussafah.

Abu Dhabi // The private company hired by the emirate to investigate minor motor-vehicle accidents completed its first full day of work, freeing regular traffic police for more than 45 man-hours to deal with more serious problems. Patrol officers working for Saaed responded to 114 accidents from 5am Monday to 5am yesterday. They arrived at accident scenes in an average 11 minutes and completed reports in an average 13 minutes.

It was deemed a good start to the official launch of the service, which is the first outsourcing of police duties in the emirate. Saaed employees went to the scenes of accidents in which there were no injuries on roads outside Abu Dhabi island, including those in Al Rahba, Shahama, Baniyas and Musaffah. "We will start with low-density, then high-density areas, so we can give the people confidence in what we do," said Ibrahim Ramel, president of Saaed.

Police said Saaed's patrols would allow officers to focus on improving road safety through increased patrols. More than 97 per cent of traffic accidents are minor, Mr Ramel said. Saaed officers receive the same training as traffic-police officers, he said. The service streamlines the reporting process for motorists involved in an accident by sending accident reports electronically to insurance companies from accident scenes.

The driver "does not now have to bother himself to go and submit papers to the insurance company", Mr Ramel said. "His report will be directly received by his company so he can just call the company and wherever they want him to drop the car, he can drop the car now. "All the legal process is being done automatically now." Reports will be also be available to police. Saaed patrols operate in areas where accidents are known to happen frequently.

In Musaffah on Monday, two of Saaed's "traffic experts" were called to deal with a minor accident, in which a taxi was hit from behind by a minibus. An operator at a centre in Abu Dhabi took a call redirected from the emergency 999 number, located the nearest available Saaed car on a GPS device, and sent it to the accident scene within minutes. Two Saaed employees recorded the accounts of both drivers, drew a diagram depicting the accident and took photos of the taxi's licence plate, damage to the car and its chassis number. Both parties agreed that the minibus driver was at fault. Had they disagreed, police would have been called.

The men received tickets, which they would need for dealing with their insurance companies later. On Monday, the officers used pen and paper but as of yesterday, everything was being done digitally. That includes the reconstruction diagram, which is created on a laptop computer by clicking on images of various types of roads and vehicles as well as traffic signs, trees and signals, to create images showing how accidents occurred.

Saaed plans to begin operating in Al Ain next month and to be patrolling parts of Al Gharbia and on Abu Dhabi island by the end of the year. It plans to increase its current fleet of 25 cars to 48. Mr Ramel said there are also plans to introduce more technology to make sharing data easier and further simplify the accident-reporting process. "Yourself, traffic police, insurance and the car workshop, they are all related to one thing, the car involved in the accident," he said. "But today nobody talks to the other parts.

"See how it would be easy and fast if this kind of data is available to all parties at the same time." [e-mail]