Strategy aims to reduce road deaths in Qatar

By Joseph Varghese/Staff Reporter

Qatar aims to reduce the number of major traffic accidents from 300 to 250 per 100,000 persons by 2016,  a Traffic Department official has said.

Riyadh Ahmed Faleh, safety awareness officer at the Traffic Department, said that there were 1,167,346 traffic violations in 2012, 39.2% higher than 2011 during which there were 838,796 violations.

Faleh was addressing a gathering of leaders from different expatriate communities in the country, convened to create awareness about the Interior Ministry’s  traffic safety strategy for the year 2011–2016 at the headquarters of the Traffic Department recently.

He said: “The ratio of traffic accident deaths per 100,000 persons in Qatar was nine in 2012 and 9.8 in 2011. The global ratio of traffic deaths is 17 per 100,000 persons while the average ratio of Western countries is 10 deaths per 100,000 persons.”

According to Faleh, the Traffic Department aims to reduce the ratio of traffic accident deaths to 10% of total mortality rate of the country in 2016. He added that reducing the pedestrian deaths annually to the global standard of less than 17% of traffic accident deaths was another goal of the department.

The official highlighted that there was a 7.6% increase  in the number of vehicles in Qatar in 2012 compared to 2011. There were 814,373 vehicles in 2011 while in 2012 the number rose to 876,039. Similarly, there was a 11.6% increase  in the number of vehicle-accident related injuries, from 3,780 in 2011 to 4,218 in 2012. There was also an increase of 3.2% in major accidents from 586 to 605 during the same period.  However, there was a slight decrease in the number of deaths from 205 in 2011 to 204 in 2012.

Faleh said that among the traffic-related deaths last year, 44  were Qataris and the rest  expatriates. He explained that 19.6 % of total traffic death victims were Arabs and 58.8% were from other expatriate communities. Some 71.6% of  these victims  was  between the age of 18 and 39 years and 45.8% of accidents with injuries and 52% of fatalities were caused by negligence and reckless driving.  A toal of 65.2% accidents resulted from collision between two vehicles.

The officials also stated that there was a decline in mortality rate of drivers and pedestrians.

He said: “There was an increase in mortality rate of passengers and it was caused by not fastening the seat belt. The deaths of pedestrians were reduced from 31.7% in 2009 to 27.4% in 2012 while driver causalities were reduced from 42.4% to 35.3%. “

“The passengers’ deaths rose from 25.9% to 37.6% during the same period,” he added.