RIYADH, 2 July 2006 — Officer Abdul Rahman Al-Bareedi is parked near Riyadh’s King Khaled Road chatting in his car with a reporter. Suddenly a car whizzes by. The radar in the officer’s unmarked vehicle beeps, clocking the vehicle at over 160 km per hour. He turns on the flashing police lights hidden behind the front grille of the car and follows the speeder in pursuit.
The driver is pulled over and after a few minutes of his whining denials, he is shown the proof of his infraction on the officer’s radar equipment. The driver’s car is impounded and he is sent to the slammer for 24 hours.
This scenario may sound unlikely in a country where nearly every man considers it his inherent right to speed indiscriminately, tailgate dangerously, pass perilously, or otherwise disregard basic, logical and safe, defensive-driving techniques.
However, Riyadh city officials have in recent years deployed a division of secret traffic police that monitors roads in the country’s capital, Asharq Al-Awsat, a sister publication of Arab News, reported yesterday.
The three-year-old police division is apparently proving successful. According to city statistics, reported traffic fatalities dropped from 478 in 2004 to 408 the following year. Injuries dropped in the same period from 1,546 to 1,408.
Lt. Gen. Saad Al-Rasheedi, chief of secret traffic police in Riyadh, said that violations go up during the school year and decline over the summer because many youth (universally the most dangerous and ignorant drivers) leave for summer vacations. The lieutenant general, sounding much like a public service announcer, emphasized that the role of the secret traffic police is to save lives.
Officer Al-Bareedi says that by far the most common infraction is speeding which studies in numerous countries have shown to be the most likely infraction to lead to traffic fatalities. Simply put: The faster traffic moves, the more people die. And fines in Riyadh reflect this grim reality.
“Drivers that drive 140 km per hour will receive a SR300 fine and the car will be seized for 24 hours,” said Al-Bareedi. “If the driver was speeding over 160 km per hour then he is fined, his car is seized, and he goes to jail for 24 hours.”
The officer says that they currently have 18 unmarked vehicles for the northern part of the nation’s capital. He admits that more vehicles are needed. “They are not enough but more cars are coming in service in the near future,” he said.
Less than five minutes after parking near an intersection on the North Ring Road, the officer nabs a teenager with no driver’s license and who blazed through a red light. The youth was arrested. Later, his father was forced to come into the station to sign a letter pledging that he will prohibit his son from driving for a year, and only then after he gets a license.
Al-Bareedi says that law-enforcement officials in Riyadh are cracking down on reckless driving, inflicting swift punishment according to the law. Still, he says, some people never learn.
“People are different. There are people that learn from punishment and there are people that are not affected at all,” he said. “There was this driver who was detained and we found out that he has more than SR30,000 in unpaid fines. He was not released until he paid his due. Drivers should have enough sense not to put themselves or others in danger.”
