During the past few years, Saudi Arabia has lost tens of thousands of lives. Most of the dead were so young they did not even reach their 20th birthday. Nowadays, road accidents claim hundreds of lives of Saudis and non-Saudis every month and that is a commonplace.
Roads, streets and highways in Saudi Arabia are generally built to be of very high standard. But, building good roads is not enough to prevent road accidents. Now, Saudi Arabia has the highest number of highway fatalities in the world. Thousands of lives are lost every year and billions of Saudi riyals are spent to treat the injured and additional billions are wasted because of discarded automobiles wrecked in accidents. It is true that we have tried to implement new rules and new methods in order to reduce highway fatalities, but it seems nothing is working to prevent road accidents. We have introduced the so-called Saher system to monitor speeding and traffic violations but still these are merely cameras catching speeding motorists and traffic violators. Most accidents occur because of negligence by the drivers, especially the young ones.
During the past few years, most of the fatal accidents occurred due to lack of concentration by drivers. Many try to make calls, read and send text messages while driving. And all it takes is just two seconds for an accident to happen. In other words, two seconds are long enough to change your life and the lives of others forever.
Saudi Arabia’s road accidents and the growing number of fatalities is becoming a national issue and there must be a total evaluation of the existing traffic rules in addition to introducing new ways of watching the roads. The traffic police should not only rely on Saher cameras and neglect the direct supervision and monitoring of the traffic. Many youngsters in Saudi Arabia have very bad driving habits with no respect for traffic rules or rights of other drivers. Bad driving for a short while is more dangerous than driving 10 kilometers within the speed limit. Also, the traffic police must be involved in preparing the traffic structure within the city to make the streets safe for driving. They should be trained how to deal with speeding cars and errant drivers. The traffic police should be educated and given orientation about new and tougher laws to check violations.
Nowadays, with the increase in road accidents because of the modern day gadgets such as mobile phones, new laws must be implemented to check careless driving. Young drivers must be told about the dangers of driving and texting. Both can’t be done at the same time. In other words we need more traffic police on the roads and not cameras next to traffic lights.
Many tougher traffic laws need to be introduced and implemented because only two seconds of callousness can cause a fatal accident.
We have lost thousands of lives and billions of riyals in accidents. What is worse is that many parents’ lives have been devastated and ruined because they have lost their loved ones in accidents.
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