Abu Dhabi: A municipality initiative to identify high risk roads in the capital and its suburbs is under way, and will allow government transport departments to find ways to reduce these risks by mid-2011, a municipality official said on Wednesday.
The initiative includes the use of a manual audit, and also makes use of a specialised network surveillance vehicle, said Sami Al Musawi Bani Hashim, traffic planning engineer and head of the road safety unit at Abu Dhabi Municipality.
"The vehicle is fitted with three cameras to identify defects and hazards on the road, including pedestrian facilities. Two of the cameras survey the road and its surroundings, and one is fitted below the vehicle to record the condition of the road surface," Hashim explained.
He was speaking at the "Making Abu Dhabi Roads Safer" seminar held on Wednesday, in which transport professionals from the UAE and the UK met with government department representatives to discuss ways to improve road safety.
Hashim told Gulf News that the network surveillance vehicle would collect high resolution still images with its cameras, and the images would then be integrated into a database to identify the roads with the highest number of casualties and hazards.
Risks to pedestrians
"The municipality will then be able to implement ways to reduce risks to pedestrians, drivers and other road users," he said.
Hashim said the project started last week and roads in Mohammad Bin Zayed City, Khalifa City A and Khalifa City B had already been surveyed.
"By the middle of next year, we intend to complete surveying and analysing all the internal roads of the capital and its suburbs," he added.
Abdullah Saeed Sultan Al Shamsi, acting executive director of municipal infrastructure and assets sector, who also spoke at the conference, said that road safety was a key priority of the municipality.
"We are aware that the many roads in the emirate are based on older design standards that only took vehicular safety into account, so it is a challenge to make the roads safe for all road users," Al Shamsi said.
He added that road safety had improved, however, since the last municipality road safety seminar in February, and that safety was now considered a priority in city road design and maintenance.
He also said that the municipality would soon release a new set of guidelines to help all transport professionals improve road safety.
