Road safety audits

Abu Dhabi:  Not all road accidents are caused by reckless driving. Many of them are a result of bad road design. In Dubai there are over 4,000 such potential safety hazards, a senior Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) official has revealed.

Hussain Al Banna, Director of the Traffic Safety Department at the RTA, said a safety audit programme has exposed the dangers posed by flawed designs. "There's a need for a compromise between engineering and safety," he said during a road safety conference in the capital on Tuesday.

Identifying errors

He said audits help to identify design faults in road infrastructure. "We learn a lot from research and it helps us rectify design faults," he said.

The 4,125 potential safety hazards have been documented from a list of 150km of freeways, 399km of express roads, 601km of arterial roads and 756km of collector roads.

Since the audits began in 2007, traffic fatalities fell from 21.7 per thousand in 2007, to 8.1 in 2010. Al Banna said there has been a 32 per cent drop in fatalities from 332 deaths in 2007 to 154 last year.

"Dubai broke all records in the past 10 years and a reduction in [road accident] fatalities is a big step," said Al Banna.

There has been a decrease in pedestrian fatalities as well, from 145 in 2007 to 42 last year.

He said the RTA has allocated a budget of Dh50 million to Dh100 million a year to correct road engineering flaws. The RTA developed its ‘Ten Steps for Road Safety Audit Checklist' in 2007 and has since made contractors and consultants comply with it.

"Dubai's boom in construction put a burden on safety engineers," said Al Banna. The traffic safety audit stressed the importance of clear zones, areas free from hazards for drivers, as well as the importance of advanced warning areas for diversions, safety barriers and crash cushions. Al Banna also said that the positioning of some road signs is dangerous because cars may crash into them.

Awareness campaign

Besides workshops for RTA engineers, developers, consultants and contractors, the agency has also organised a year-round traffic awareness campaign to improve driver behaviour on the roads, he added.