Nearly 10,000 people lose their lives due to traffic accidents in Turkey each year.
And it has a lot to do with mentality. “There really is no culture of road safety in Turkey. It’s just not part of the mentality yet,” said Dr. Etienne Krug from the World Health Organization (WHO), who shared his first impressions about Turkish people’s attitude towards traffic safety. Not observing the rules is costly as well: The total socioeconomic cost of last year’s traffic accidents could be as much as TL 16.5 billion, Interior Minister İdris Naim Şahin announced recently.
Director of the Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability at WHO, Krug, who visited Turkey June 26 and 27 to talk and exchange views with officials on a project Turkey has been implementing concerning safety on the road, didn’t hide his surprise at what he found. Talking about Ankara, “I’m struck to see such a modern city where so few people wear seat belts,” he told Today’s Zaman.
Only 22 per cent of drivers wear a seat belt in Ankara and probably even fewer passengers. In Geneva, where he is based, about 95 percent of the people wear a seat belt, and the average in Europe is estimated to be around 90 percent. “There is not much discussion about it; all wear a seat belt in Europe,” he commented to draw attention to the sharp contrast.
Wearing a seat belt saves lives: Not wearing a seat belt may increase the risk of death in road crashes by up to 60 percent. For Turkey, it’s of huge importance because not wearing a seat belt, together with excess speed, is one of the leading causes of deaths and injuries on the road.
But Turkey has also made some progress in the last couple of years towards decreasing the number of casualties in traffic accidents thanks to various projects. In the last 10 years, the number of road crashes has increased by 179 percent and injuries in accidents by 105 percent, while deaths from accidents has decreased by 8 percent. Compared to 2010,
the number of fatal crashes in Turkey decreased last year by 3.6 percent, while the number of people who lost their lives dropped by 5.2 percent.
Over 90 percent of deaths and injuries in road crashes occur in low and middle income countries, which have only 48 percent of the world’s registered vehicles. As middle-income countries such as Turkey, China, Brazil and India go through a rapid process of development, the number of roads, cars and drivers increases significantly. And as noted by Krug, this process is usually not accompanied by measures that create a culture of safety.
Since a culture of road safety is not deeply ingrained in people, they speed, don’t wear seat belts and drink and drive. But fatalism also seems to be an element, according to Krug. “In many countries, there is still fatalism. People just see it as a price to pay to become a modern country with more roads, and cars,” he commented.
In an effort to decrease the number of road crashes with casualties, Turkey launched, together with nine other countries, in June 2010 the Road Safety Project, which is coordinated by WHO and financed by the Bloomberg Foundation. Together, the 10 countries in the project — Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, Kenya, China, India, Cambodia, Vietnam and Russia — account for 60 percent of all deaths from road crashes.
Turkey’s road problem also has to do with enforcement of the existing laws. It’s common knowledge that Turkish people living in Europe obey the rules of the road more strictly than their relatives in Turkey, who allow themselves to act more freely on the road. It’s because Turks in Europe are aware that laws will be enforced and that they stand little chance of getting off scot-free. Commenting on the situation in Turkey, Krug noted: “Legislation is more or less quite adequate, but it’s not enforced. Seat belts are obligatory, but how many people wear them in Turkey?”
Traffic accidents are among major causes of death and injury in the world. Nearly 1.3 million people die each year on the world’s roads, and 20-50 million people sustain non-fatal injuries. If current trends continue, road crashes are predicted to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030, resulting in 2.4 million deaths a year. In a bid to prevent 5 million road traffic deaths globally by 2020, in May 2011, the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 project was launched – coordinated by the United Nations in more than 100 countries. Turkey, with over 23 million drivers and more than 16 million registered vehicles on the road, aims to cut the number of road casualties in half in 10 years
.Source Zaman
