According to the daily newspaper Al-Watan, in the first 20 days of 2006 there were 264 deaths and 646 injuries on the Kingdom’s roads. This translates to 13 deaths per day.
A year ago, I was participating in one of the programs on the Majad channel along with a number of traffic police officials in the Kingdom. The program was an initiative to support one of the public awareness campaigns. That’s great, but how many traffic awareness campaigns have we had so far? Does anyone have a clue whether previous awareness campaigns have had any effect on reducing the amount of blood spilled on our country’s pavements?
On the show, people were surprised when I said we don’t need any more awareness campaigns. We’ve had “Traffic Week” every year since we were children, and since then more programs, lectures, posters, booklets and awareness kiosks in shopping malls have been piled on top. But it seems none of these tactics actually do anything but make people feel like action is being taken to confront the problem with reckless driving. The more awareness we raise, it seems, the more accidents occur. That might not be a fair correlation, but it’s a fact that campaigns and lectures have had no effect.
Riyadh resident Ali Al-Enizy has a son in a coma that was the result of a road collision. Al-Enizy suggests a new tactic: take high school students to intensive care wards and physical therapy clinics and let them visit accident victims.
Perhaps seeing injury up close would help open these youths’ eyes a bit wider to the consequences of joyriding and disregarding traffic laws and common sense.
Al-Enizy’s suggestion is a good one, but I’m certain that no amount of public awareness is effective without other measures, such as proactive enforcement of the law. How about we save ourselves the cost of printing up posters and flyers and actually do something to prevent losing more life on the country’s roads?
