I am a frequent road traveler, in Saudi Arabia and other countries. Sometimes by necessity, other times by choice. Although cars cannot compete with airplanes for speed or with trains for comfort, in many cases they are the only option available, especially in Saudi Arabia where we have virtually no train service and airline service is spotty to many destinations. Of course, cars have an advantage; they provide flexibility and unlimited possibilities to discover and enjoy the countryside.
However, cars are the most dangerous mode of travel. In the United States, where they use all of those modes of transport, about 33,000 people die in car accidents annually, with over 250 million cars on its roads. Compare that to just 20 deaths in accidents on commercial airlines carrying 630 million passengers a year, and just four fatalities in train accidents out of 500 million rail passengers.
Car accidents have become so common that we barely think about them, unless they involve relatives or close friends, or involve a large number of cars and fatalities. Around the world, about 1.25 million people are killed in car accidents every year.
In Saudi Arabia, fatal car accidents have reached epidemic proportions and getting worse over time. According to official statistics, road fatalities have reached about 7,000 a year — several times higher than other high-income countries. Nearly 70,000 are injured annually as a result of car accidents on our roads. Every day, around 20 people get killed in car accidents and 200 injured. Over the past 22 years, road accidents have killed around 100,000 people and injured nearly a million. 30 percent of hospital beds are occupied by accident victims.
One police official called it a form of “terrorism on our roads.” Considering the magnitude and number of casualties, the phenomenon is more like a regular war that we have decided to wage against ourselves. Or mass suicide.
Such shocking statistics cry out for a solution. It is easy to blame drivers, especially if they are dead. Or simplistically reduce the problem to speeding. It is much more complicated than that. What is even more alarming is that fatality rates are increasing over time, indicating the failure of the solutions that have been tried thus far to limit the hemorrhage of innocent lives.
While Saudi Arabia does not have the highest rate of road fatalities, it is near the top. In a ranking of (183) countries made by the World Health Organization (WHO), Saudi Arabia was at No.15. However, the fourteen countries with higher road fatalities were mostly poor countries in Africa.
Comparing Saudi Arabia with high-income, industrialized countries, we see a different picture. First, fatality rates in those countries are much lower. After adjusting to the size of the population, the rate of road fatalities in Saudi Arabia equals six times Japan’s rate, five times Germany’s rate and eight times the UK rate.
The country, some may say, is of continental proportions and sparsely populated, making it difficult to compare it to smaller-sized countries, as travel between its cities requires long-distance travel at high speeds. To take those factors into consideration, let us then compare it to large-area countries. Let us compare its road fatality rate to those of Australia, Canada and the United States, all substantially larger than Saudi Arabia; Australia is 3.5 times larger, Canada and the US 4.5 times. It turns out that Saudi road fatality rate, after adjusting for population size, is five times that of Australia, four times Canada’s rate, and 2.5 times that of the United States.
Second, while road fatality rates are rising over time in Saudi Arabia, they have been steadily falling in other high-income income countries. In the UK, for example, the rate declined from around 5,500 in 1985, to about 1,750 in 2012. In Australia, it declined from nearly 3,000 in 1985, to fewer than 1,200 in 2013.
Why have fatality rates kept climbing much more than other countries? I read papers written by specialists and they seem to be at a loss to explain the exact factors behind the phenomenon.
Of course, as the specialists say, the reasons behind fatality rates can be found in the triumvirate: Driver, vehicle, and road, but those are true for every country; they do not explain the particular Saudi case. In fact the rise in road fatality rates demonstrates the inadequacy of the solutions that have been tried so far.
Take seat belts, for example, which are credited in other countries with reducing fatalities, and where failure to wear them has been identified as responsible for about one sixth of all road fatalities. Although Saudi Arabia enacted a law in 2000 that made it mandatory to wear seatbelts for the drivers and front-seat passenger, compliance has been limited, as a recent study has shown. Furthermore, backseat passengers rarely put on their seatbelts. Similarly for airbags; not all cars come equipped with them. Backseats, in particular, are often not protected by airbags.
While speed has been identified as a major cause for road fatalities, a driver’s inexperience and carelessness have been shown in other countries to lead to more fatalities than speed. We have devoted only a little effort to deal with those less quantifiable factors.
As for the cars on our roads, they frequently travel without adequate lighting. Tires and even brakes rarely get checked, except every three years during the inspection mandatory for renewing a car’s registration. Some drivers have found a way to get around that too. They rent good tires for one hour to pass the inspection and then revert back to their old tires.
Finally, road conditions and the quality of medical emergency services complete the circle of culprits in road fatalities. I will devote a future column to these two factors, as I observed them during my road travels, to see if they can explain part of our failure to stem the bleeding on our roads, beside driver and car conditions.
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