Abu Dhabi traffic safety conference focuses on dangers of speeding

Abu Dhabi: A car moving at a speed of 70 kilometres per hour (km/h) has energy equivalent to 40 bullets, a road safety official said, emphasising the need to avoid speeding to save lives.

Speeding vehicles have tremendous kinetic energies that have the potential to take lives, Andrew Pearce, the CEO of Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP) said.

"A car moving at 50km/h has roughly the same energy as 20 rifle bullets and a vehicle moving at 70km/h has the about same energy as 40 bullets," he told the Road Safety on Four Continents (RS4C) conference that kicked off in the capital Sunday.

If a pedestrian is hit by a car that is doing 70km/h, death is a near certainty, he noted.

GRSP, a programme of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, works to bring together governments, businesses and civil societies together to address road safety issues in low- and middle-income countries.

In his speech, Pearce highlighted the difficulty in getting adequate funding for tackling the global road safety disaster despite traffic death tolls being worse than natural calamities.

"In May 2008, a cyclone in Burma and an earthquake in China, together claimed around 200,000 lives. Traffic accidents across the world claim the same number of lives every month," he said.

While these two natural disasters generated nearly a billion dollars of international aid over two years to remediate its impacts, the global road traffic disaster found less than $20 million during the same time, he noted

He put the losses by way of traffic accidents worldwide at $65 billion annually.

It is for the first time that UAE is playing host to the RS4C conference, which concludes tomorrow. Delegates from over 50 countries are participating in the fifteenth edition of the conference, hosted by the National Transport Authority (NTA).

"The latest statistics by international organisations show that road accidents are the third cause of death after war and epidemics. Not to mention the disabilities, deformities and loss of property due to these accidents. This shows the importance of addressing road safety," Dr Nasser Saif Al Mansouri, director general of NTA, said.

Since its first edition in 1987, the Swedish National Roads and Transport Research Institute (VTI) has organised the conference, which now covers four continents — Europe, North America, Africa and Asia.

Numbers

In Abu Dhabi -

Jan 1-March 3, 2010 - 10 deaths from speeding

24 severe injuries from speeding

358,694 speeding tickets issued in the same period -

(Source - Abu Dhabi police)

Accidents

Global toll

Source - WHO