JEDDAH: The Riyadh Development Authority has introduced a new system to identify road accident hotspots on highways quickly and take preventative action.
"The new system will help reduce the number of deaths following road accidents," a traffic official said.
Authorities will identify accident-prone areas on the roads in order to study reasons for increasing accidents and find engineering solutions for them.
The higher committee for traffic safety, chaired by acting Riyadh Gov. Prince Sattam, has approved the system as part of its efforts to cut down accident rates in the capital.
Ever since the application of a strategy for traffic safety in Riyadh in 2003, road accident deaths in Riyadh have been slashed from 479 to 256 while cases of serious injuries fell from 1,546 to 910.
The decline in accident deaths is significant as it comes after a tremendous increase in the number of vehicles on the roads while the number of their daily trips jumped from 5.8 million to 6.2 million.
The application of the Saher traffic monitoring system was also instrumental in cutting down accident rates across Saudi Arabia.
"There has been an 18.9 percent decline in the number of road deaths in the Eastern Province," said Lt. Col. Ali Al-Zahrani, supervisor of the Saher program in the region.
He added that road accidents in February 2011 dropped by 7.7 percent compared to the same month in 2010. Injuries in road-related accidents have also dropped by 30.4 percent following Saher's implementation.
Saher was introduced in Dammam, Alkhobar, Qatif and Dhahran in early January. It was first introduced in Riyadh and Jeddah where it has been pivotal in curbing road accidents.
According to the Traffic Department, an average of 17 people die on the Kingdom's roads each day.
The World Health Organization found Saudi Arabia to have the world's highest number of deaths from road accidents, which now make up the country's principal cause of death in adult males aged 16 to 36.
A recent study has revealed that 6,485 people have died and more than 36,000 injured in over 485,000 traffic accidents in 2008 and 2009.
Over the past two decades Saudi Arabia has recorded 4 million traffic accidents, leading to 86,000 deaths and 611,000 injuries, 7 percent of which resulted in permanent disabilities.
A recent study at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology warned that if the current rate in road accident rates is not curbed, Saudi Arabia will have over 4 million traffic accidents a year by 2030.
© Arab News 2011
