| Egypt Today continues its efforts to promote safer roads and driving practices with the final article in its 'Save a Life' campaign series |
| By Farida Helmy |
| If 1.3 million people were killed and 20–50 million more injured each year by any other single cause than traffic accidents, reactions would definitely be different.But while plenty of attention is given to eradicating diseases, poverty and other devastating conditions, road safety remains largely ignored.Road traffic injuries are among the three leading causes of death between the ages of five and 44, with more than 3,000 deaths each day around the world. Unless effective actions are taken immediately, it is predicted to become the fifth leading cause of death for all age groups, resulting in an estimated 2.4 million deaths globally each year.
That’s a huge number for a phenomenon rarely reported, a phenomenon only mentioned in the media if a high-profile accident occurs and a phenomenon that puts a strain on just about anything related to the development of a nation.
Traffic accidents are the second-highest cause of death in Egypt, making road safety the nation’s number-one public health issue. Thousands are killed and tens of thousands are injured in traffic accidents every year. Road safety affects the lives of everyone living in Egypt.
Even with continuous efforts of local and international initiatives to combat the problem, such as the United Nation’s Decade of Action plan and the RS-10 Project, the number of fatalities and injuries on Egypt’s roads continues to rise.
This month Egypt Today continues its efforts to promote safer roads and driving practices with the final article in its ‘Save A Life’ campaign series.
Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today
Join us now and do the same — why wait for more people to die on the nation’s roads before we as the public, we as the media and we as a country do something about it?
Putting Things in Perspective
“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Australia was involved in the Vietnam War. In the same period that 460 soldiers were killed in Vietnam, over 10,000 were killed on the roads in Australia. People marched in the streets to stop the war and bring our soldiers home, but the war on the roads was not even newsworthy,” says Australian Gayle Dipietro, global manager of the Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP), which is hosted by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Thankfully, things have changed, with a growing awareness that the current road safety situation constitutes a crisis with devastating health, social and economic impacts. According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, the economic consequences alone reach between 1% and 3% of the GNP of the world’s countries combined, totaling over $500 billion. As Egypt struggles with its economy, an overwhelming 2.5% of Egypt’s GNP is lost to the consequences of traffic accidents.
But road accidents are preventable with interventions that have proven effective in reducing death and serious injury. But if we want our roads to be safer, there must be political commitment to seriously and genuinely address the problem, and the needed resources must be made available to create a safe traffic system.
There’s a lot to be done. Transportation authorities have to improve and design safer roads, and promote proper land use and transport planning. The government also needs to effectively manage crash data and improve post-care and rehabilitation systems for accident victims. The automotive industry needs to incorporate active and passive safety features in all vehicles sold locally and abolish the second-hand spare-parts market, because used parts cause more accidents and make vehicles less safe if they are involved in accidents. Police must enforce laws about helmet, seat-belt, child restraints and driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
“The road safety problem needs to be addressed and managed across all sectors of government: transport, security, planning, health, education and finance. Involvement of the business sector is important, as they usually rate safety as a high priority and regard the value of human life. Participation by civil society in road safety is critical too. People on the ground know where and what the problem is and usually have a working solution for the road users,” says GRSP’s Dipietro.
Dipietro explains that while a key player, civil society alone can no longer bear the costs of road trauma and mobilize quickly enough to stop the carnage as they need support from the government to close the legislative and policy loopholes that put them at risk.
“As a minimum, governments need to provide safer roads and safer vehicles to the public,” she says.
Getting the Public in on the Plan
Mohamed Sheta, a road safety activist and publisher and editor of Auto Arabia, believes we need to educate every Egyptian road user — from pedestrians, bicycles and animal-drawn carts to motorcycles, cars and trucks — about how their behavior and their vehicle choices affect their safety and that of others on the road. That way, it will be easier to convince the road user to obey traffic rules and laws for safety reasons, not for fear of a ticket or fine.
“We also need to have dedicated awareness campaigns targeting different age groups, as the risk of crashes varies dramatically between different ages and genders,” Sheta says. “Germany and the European Union have been very successful with such campaigns, as well as ‘shock-campaigns’, which I strongly recommend to implement in Egypt as well. We simply need to change the attitude of Egyptians regarding road safety.”
The human error factor is one of the biggest issues challenging road safety in Egypt, since drivers and pedestrians are often unaware of — or simply ignore — most road traffic codes and laws. There are countless national laws governing seat belt use, speeding, blood alcohol levels and helmet use for two-wheelers; they are just rarely enforced and hardly followed by the population at large.
Marwan Hammad, chairman of the Egyptian Society for Road Safety (ESRS), is working to raise public awareness of the issue, using a model partnership between civil society and the government that has proven successful globally. Advocated by GRSP, the partnership brings together a wide range of participants including governments, citizens, industry, NGOs and the media.
“People need to get involved and take the initiative to do something about road safety. It took the ESRS a long time to figure out how to do it,” says Hammad. “It cost us money and time and commitment, but we were able to help at the end of it. We believe that unless people work together on these issues, nothing will happen. The government will not be able to solve everything on its own.”
Hammad believes in focusing on the youth because of their ability to learn and adapt to things without preconceived attitudes. In one project, ESRS showed 200 kids from different schools a performance about how microbus drivers drive without respect for traffic rules.
“It was a good way to get the kids to understand the dangers of road safety. After the show, the kids told us they were going to share what they learned with their families,” he says. “If you ever lose hope of changing attitudes, you lose. So I really do encourage people to allocate some time to the issue because they need to realize that in five minutes they might not be there anymore.”
Sheta is not as convinced about how well NGOs and civil society have so far dealt with road safety in Egypt. “I have the feeling that some NGOs are just working in this field to collect money and funding for their own benefit. I know about an NGO that collected $50,000 for just producing a couple thousand CDs with some pictures on them. I consider such activities a complete waste of money, from which only the managers or founders of the NGO benefit personally.
“There are too many NGOs trying to get a piece of the funding ‘cake.’ Most of the NGOs are not up to date with advanced road safety technology and have no technical background or technical experts among them,” he asserts. “Most of them are only active in Cairo or Alexandria, whereas a large number of accidents take place in the Nile Delta and Sinai.”
Sheta says that it doesn’t make sense to have 10 or 20 NGOs doing the exact same type of outreach with 10 or 20 partners from the private sector. This is a waste of effort and money. He believes we need to find synergies between the professional NGOs and start working on one big awareness campaign to find the best and most effective road safety solutions for Egypt.
Making Things Legit
Road safety is a very complex issue that needs close cooperation between several ministries within the government, namely the Ministry of Industry, the Egyptian Organization for Standardization (EOS) and the ministries of interior, health, tourism and finance.
According to Sheta, the Ministry of Interior and its Traffic Department should make sure, through daily checkpoints on public roads, that every car, motorcycle, microbus, taxi, truck and bus has successfully passed a roadworthiness test and has a valid roadworthiness certificate. The Traffic Department must also increase its presence on the roads and use the Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) to reduce the number of violations and thus the number of crashes on Egyptian roads.
Sheta recommends that the Ministry of Finance and its Customs Authority must exempt active and passive safety features for vehicles, such as air bags, anti-lock braking systems, Lane Assist Systems and others from custom duties.
“They should even give custom duty discounts on vehicles equipped with such life-saving systems,” Sheta says. “We should reward and not punish the car companies and therefore the consumer for buying a car with such important safety features.”
He adds that the Ministry of Tourism should mandate rigorous testing for tourism bus drivers and make sure that each bus always has two drivers onboard when transporting tourists and have an installed ‘alcohol and drug tester.’
“This of course should be applied for trucks as well. In addition to that, the Ministry of Tourism should work very closely with the EOS and Customs Authority in order to prohibit low-quality, unsafe buses from China and anywhere else from entering Egypt,” says Sheta. “Additionally, there has been no noticeable or effective road safety activity from the Egyptian Automobile and Touring Club or from the Egyptian Motorsport Federation so far. None of the racing organizers in Egypt have ever promoted any effective road safety campaigns or activities. The least they could have done was to try to limit illegal street racing and take them off public streets and on to secured racing tracks.”
The RS-10 in Action
Adnan Hyder, director of the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU) at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the main issue with road safety is what’s referred to as an implementation gap.
“We know the statistics: We know that 90% of road traffic deaths occur in low- and middle- income countries, despite the fact that they have less than 50% of the world’s registered automobiles. And we have a growing body of evidence that points to supporting road safety programs and the need for effective implementation of evidence-based interventions,” says Hyder. “Despite all the polices and information, action is still slow in coming, largely because developing countries have yet to devote adequate funds for road safety that are proportional to the very real burden of what is happening.”
Hyder feels that if decision-makers had solid evidence to show them, for example, how important funding is for this kind of work, if they understood the impact of human and economic losses suffered with current road traffic injury rates — which is estimated at $100 billion every year in low- and middle-income countries — they’d be better about devoting adequate monies.
“And of course, that’s a big part of what we do,” says Hyder. “We are behind the scenes, gathering the evidence to advocate for this kind of support.”
In 2010, the JH-IIRU joined a consortium of six partners to form the Road Safety in 10 Countries Project (RS-10). It was formed with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies with the primary goal of reducing deaths and serious injuries in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by providing proof for stronger road safety interventions around the world.
As part of this consortium, JH-IIRU is monitoring an effective and evidence-based set of interventions that are nationally relevant, addressing things such as infrastructure and law enforcement and public actions implemented by the government and national partnerships. This monitoring and evaluation plan combines international expertise with national collaborators to ensure efficient and objective assessments in each country.
“We did this by first creating a high-level working group of stakeholders at the national level and developing a joint national work plan. We are reviewing road safety legislation and training police and law enforcement officers. We are engaging civil society through national awareness and safety campaigns being launched by NGOs,” explains Hyder. “We have solicited and involved local partners from all relevant sectors — health, transport, police — to help plan and oversee and participate in the interventions. In each country, we’ve identified intervention sites as well as a set of risk factors to focus on.”
In Egypt, intervention sites include the Cairo Ring Road and Alexandria Corniche, along with speed, seat belt use and child restraint use identified as the target risk factors.
Capacity development is also a vital feature of the RS-10 project, which has conducted training and skills development programs for national and local public health sector professionals, police and relevant stakeholders in each country. For example, in September 2010, JH-IIRU team members hosted a workshop to train local collaborators in Cairo on evaluation methods and the basic principles of roadside observations and interview studies.
“We have done this in each of the 10 identified countries, and as a result, at the end of the project, national professionals will be trained in relevant data collection and good practice interventions,” says Hyder. “The data we have collected and evaluated so far only contributes to the growing amount of evidence for road safety interventions, which will help those decision makers implement policies and solutions that are proven to be effective.”
According to Hyder, the RS-10 project is making huge strides in road safety. They have just published a special issue of Traffic Injury Prevention, which includes 11 scientific papers jointly authored by JH-IIRU officials, their in-country collaborators as well as the WHO. The papers highlight new and aggregate data collected and analyzed in the 10 participating countries during the first two years of the RS-10 project.
“This growing body of evidence that we are gathering on the burden and the distribution of road traffic injuries will help develop policies and solutions that are proven effective in saving lives,” says Hyder, “and I am hopeful that they will serve as a foundation for future work, not only in the 10 participating countries, but for road safety research yet to come.”
This kind of concerted, multi-sectoral effort with a foundation in strong, evidence-based interventions takes time. But without a strong foundation, long-term road safety interventions can’t happen. And without long-term safety interventions, lives will continue to be lost.
There are many causes of road traffic injuries and fatalities, and so the solutions to reduce the burden need to be addressed broadly as well. “There is not one entity to ‘blame.’ Rather, energy should be focused on the concerted effort of shared responsibility,” says Hyder.
Hyder explains that this requires a commitment to informed decision-making by everyone involved: Governments need to understand the importance of taking ownership of road safety initiatives, of earmarking funding for research and education and better infrastructure. Law enforcement must be fair, with a zero-tolerance policy for those who do not follow the law. The public also needs to understand the importance of wearing seat belts and helmets, obeying traffic laws, and not operating a motor vehicle of any kind while under the influence of drugs.
“This is relevant to every country, not just Egypt. Although, admittedly, due to the current instability of its government, the state of Egypt’s road safety efforts is more complicated than in other places,” he says. “I hope that the government, civil society and the private sector in Egypt will rally around the very important issue of road safety as it is a natural progression of social justice.”
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