What ails UAE roads?

Dubai: UAE’s floating population and growing mix of nationalities, coupled with a high percentage of youngsters driving high performance cars along with a general tendency to multitask behind the wheels are some of the main contributors of poor road behaviour in the country.

According to a leading Dubai-based road safety expert, constantly changing demographics, with huge presence of expatriate population along with a relatively young driving history of the country, have resulted in a very unstable and immature driving culture in the UAE.

“First of all there is a constantly shifting population in Dubai, as a large number of people keep moving in and out due to a smaller visa cycle. So the culture of driving in Dubai is lacking in maturity,” said Robert Hodges, COO of Emirates Driving Institute, one of the leading driving schools in Dubai.

Driving style

Hodges, who is an internationally recognised and highly experienced road-risk, driver training and road safety expert, added: “Another important thing to understand is that UAE is a young nation and the driving culture here is not fully developed yet. When compared to countries that have had motor cars for more than a century, where people have established a certain driving style, the driving culture here is not more than few decades old and hence is still evolving.”

He said in most Western countries there is a way of driving and it is easy to adapt to that style of driving as everybody is following the same pattern.

“You go to any country in the West, you can quickly adapt to its prevalent style of driving, because everybody is driving like that. But here the style of driving is constantly evolving because of evolving demographics and different people driving differently because of their backgrounds so there is no question of adapting to any particular style,” he added.

Hodges said social imprint plays a key role in forming the driving habits and since expatriates dominate the population here, the styles they bring in from their native countries become prevalent.

Spatial management

Elaborating further on the demographic causes forming the local road habits he said: “Research has shown that people here have poor spatial management. Spatial awareness is poor here because, so many people come here from societies where they live in close physical contact with others, they are used to taking liberties with other people’s space, but on the road, of course, that can be very dangerous.”

Shedding more light on the issue, he said: “For those who are used to living in close contact with each other it is quite acceptable to drive close to others or to cut in and they don’t see anything wrong with it, but to those who are not used to such close physical contacts it is shocking, so this naturally leads to a conflict and chaos on roads.”

He also claimed that people in the UAE have low level of planographic reasoning.

What it means is that people are not good at reading maps or finding their directions easily, which forces them to make sudden, quick manoeuvres, putting other road users at risk.

“If a person with poor planographic reasoning and poor spatial awareness drives a car there is every chance that he is mostly on the wrong track and he realises that late and suddenly decides to cut through all the lanes on the left, because he has to take a U-turn, which puts everybody on the road to high risk,” said Hodges, explaining why so many people on UAE roads make sudden manoeuvres.

He added: “These people don’t even think about others. It doesn’t even occur to them that they cause a problem to others. This is a big challenge that needs to be tackled carefully.”

Young drivers

Adding to this mixture of people with poor spatial awareness and planographic reasoning is a high percentage of new and young drivers.

“Another important factor is the demographics. We have got a large percentage of young people or young drivers in this country. Adding to that is a lot of new drivers. Younger people are obviously less experienced than older people and psychologically are more likely to make a poor judgement or are known to take greater risks,” said Hodges, who has carried out several in-depth research works on driving habits in the country.

It is a fact that everyday thousands of new people enter this country, a huge percentage of these new entrants, across a wide age spectrum, go on to get a driving licence.

According to Hodges, the likelihood of these drivers having an accident during their first 18 months of driving is quite high.

Another factor that is contributing to bad road behaviour, according to Hodges, is a combination of good roads and fast cars.

“We have many world class and high speed roads here and the number of high performance cars driven by relatively inexperienced drivers is also high, which combine to become a high risk on road,” he observed.