Three hurt in nine-car pileup

Three motorist were injured in a nine-car pileup in the heart of the capital on Sunday.
The accident occurred when a car driven at high speed by a young Saudi man smashed into a car at the end of a line of crawling vehicles in a traffic jam on Umar ibn Al-Kathhab Road in Malaz.
The nine cars involved in the accident were heavily damaged and had to be towed away from the site of the accident since they could not be driven.
“The vehicle driven by the reckless young man would have caught fire if it were not for the timely intervention of the firefighters who arrived at the scene promptly,” an eye-witness told Arab News. He said the three people injured were rushed to hospital and were in serious condition.
“The traffic police officer who attended to the procedures related to the accident, in the absence of the Najm personnel who failed to turn up, did an admirable job with his polite approach,” one of the motorists involved in the accident said.
Hameed Mowlana, whose car was damaged in the front and back, said that today’s motorists are more concerned with sending text messages on their handheld devices than the safety of other road users.
“The alarming reckless driving of young motorists, especially those addicted to cell phones, is a serious threat to disciplined and well-behaved motorists,” Mowlana said.
With the highest rate of road accidents and fatalities in the region, the Kingdom has the world’s most dangerous roads.
Statistics from the General Directorate of Traffic show that the Kingdom records 23 deaths per 100,000 people, with on average 19.1 road fatalities occurring daily.
Experts predict that if the current rate of traffic accidents persists, the Kingdom may have 4 million traffic accidents a year by 2030. This means that one person will die every hour on Saudi roads in 2014 if the country’s accident rate continues at its current pace. There are approximately 7,100 road fatalities each year and 38,000 seriously injured individuals, of whom 7 percent are permanently disabled.
Recently, the Council of Ministers approved the National Strategic Plan for Traffic Safety that has the key objective of framing a national traffic safety policy specifying broad future traffic plans and measures to cut down on road accidents.





According to a study conducted by Hany Hassan, assistant professor of transportation engineering at King Saud University, there were 600,000 road accidents in the Kingdom in 2012, resulting in the death of 7,638 people.
The number of deaths arising from road accidents Kingdom-wide reached 6,142 cases in 2009, then jumped to 6,596 in 2010, and reached 7,638 cases in 2012, which is a 24 percent increase since 2009.
Region-wise, Riyadh registered the highest number of road accidents in 2012 with 166,800 accidents, followed by Makkah with 134,700, and the Eastern Province with 116,000.