Road accidents during Eid periods increase significantly [Archives:2005/892/Front Page]
Yasser Mohammed Al-Mayyasi
SANA'A – Oct. 27- The statistics of traffic administration indicated that most traffic accidents take place during Eid periods as a result of the large numbers of travelers who travel back at their home towns and villages to spend Eid holidays with their families, causing traffic jams, accidents and confusion among drivers, converting happiness of Eid into tragedies with casualties.
Most accidents take place in inter-city highways and are a result of excessive speed and ignorance of traffic safety regulations, in addition to the lack of appropriate malignance of vehicles especially public transportation vehicles and taxies, which tend to operate continuously to satisfy passengers' demand during this peak season on the expense of vehicle's inspection and maintenance, and the driver's ability to work for continuous and sleepless hours.
Indeed, this factor causes the most accidents in commercial transport, as drivers exhaust their concentration in order to create considerable profit during this period. Drivers also tend to overload their vehicles with passengers and goods and sometime use vehicles which are not suited for human transport such as Pick-up vehicles and Lorries, which contribute to the casualties and lose of life in traffic accidents.
The badly designed and narrow streets have their contribution to this problem, especially that the same routes are used by bigger trucks and commercial vehicles which tend to block the view and don't allow smaller passenger cars to overtake easily causing accidents, as a matter of fact most passenger car drivers complain of the ignorance of lorry drivers for the basic safety rules of driving jeopardizing the lives of other vehicles on the roads, taking advantage of the lack of surveillance and non-regulation of the traffic, as traffic men do not exists on inter-city roads except on selected locations along the highways.
Yemen Times meets passengers and traffic executives:
Adil Ahmed, who is a passenger traveling to Taiz expressed his concern that passengers may utilize any means of transportation available, even if they can see that vehicles are in no condition to travel or even if they were unfit for human transportation, as the high demand for these services derives higher costs of transportation in turn making passengers seek cheaper means of transportation regardless of their safety.
Traffic man Anwar Hassan says that the passengers are to blame for the high prices and creating the price anarchy, he said the presences of the arbitrary cars that work during this time is due to shortage in the public commuters. He said that if these cars are not allowed to carry passengers, passengers will not be able to go and spend Eid with their families. Observers say that traffic men do not care about passengers' lives; their tasks are limited to preventing unlicensed vehicles from carrying passengers commercially.
Passengers demand severe measures to be taken against reckless and dangerous drivers, even at the peak season of Eid, and require long-term solutions in order to save peoples lives and decrease the numbers of accidents and casualties.
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