Why we need to discipline our drivers
Driving in Sri Lanka, especially in Colombo is a real nightmare. Sad truth is no matter what Sri Lanka Police and government does, situation gets worse day by day.
I tried putting together stats of new vehicle registrations from Department of Motor Traffic. In 2015 we have a staggering number of 668,907 new vehicle registrations, almost doubling the value of 2010. We have so many vehicles on our roads and the numbers are growing rapidly despite the rising cost of purchasing and maintaining a vehicle.
So obviously more vehicles on the road with less disciplined drivers lead to more accidents.
According to National Council for Road Safety there has been 3003 deaths due to road accidents in 2016 which has increased from 2436 in 2014 and 2801 in 2015. These deaths occur from fatal accidents.
It is apparent that motorcycles and three-wheelers are often involved in fatal accidents and the numbers have alarmingly increased over the recent years.
Not only in Sri Lanka, according to World Health Organization, a road user dies every 25 seconds in the world. This accumulates to 1.2 million deaths per year across the globe. Somehow,
“Most (90%) of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, even though these countries have only about half the world’s vehicles.”
I used an alluvial diagram to visualize the connection between income level, traffic death rates and type of vehicles involved for 138 countries where data was available.
The left bar corresponds to income level, center bar for estimated road traffic death rate per 100,000 population and right bar for major victims of traffic deaths for a country. For example in Sri Lanka, drivers/passengers of 2 or 3 wheelers are the major victims of traffic deaths.
I have adjusted the size of the representation to account for the number of traffic deaths. We can clearly observe the majority of traffic deaths occur in middle income countries causing death for drivers/passengers of 2/3 wheeled vehicles.
One major cause for this high rate of traffic deaths is due to lack of laws and standards in those countries. According to WHO, wearing a seat-belt can reduce fatalities among front-seat occupants by up to 50% and among rear-seat car occupants by up to 75%. Therefore they consider a country has good seat-belt laws only if the law applies to drivers, front-seat passengers as well as rear-seat passengers. As of 2015, 105 countries have implemented good seat-belt laws and sadly Sri Lanka is not among them.
You can find the country profile page of Sri Lanka at the following link. This interactive tool provides great insights from the Global status report on road safety 2015.
As highlighted by WHO, vehicle standards and laws regarding drink-driving, speed, seat belts, helmets and child seats are only one part of the solution. It has a lot to do with the discipline of the drivers.
Official records show that, 23 per cent of drivers responsible for fatal accidents did not possess valid licences, the worst offenders being motorcycle riders, who made up nearly 49 per cent of that number followed by lorry drivers at 14 per cent and van drivers at 11 per cent. (The Sunday Times on January 03, 2016)
So in my opinion, unless the following happen in near future, we will never be able to overcome the current sad condition of our roads.
- Improving public transportation
- Strengthening the process of issuing driving license and providing adequate training for drivers before they take the wheel.
- Revising laws and fines to meet current requirements and enforcing them strictly.
Meanwhile, drivers could help a lot by being a little responsible and a little patient behind the wheel without putting your life and the lives of other innocent road users at risk.
And more importantly don’t be an asshole on the road!
Note
In WHO report, number of traffic deaths for Sri Lanka and several other countries where official statistics have not been available are estimated using negative binomial regression model. Somehow, Ministry of Transport & Civil Aviation, Sri Lanka states the figure as 2801 for the year 2015. I have used this figure instead of estimation for my analysis.
Please refer EXPLANATORY NOTE 3 (Page 70) of the global status report on Road Safety 2015 for more details.
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