Stricter traffic rules will reduce mishaps: Official
Manama : As many as 19 lives were lost due to traffic accidents this year, as per the latest data revealed by the General Directorate of Traffic in Interior Ministry yesterday.
This was revealed by the Ministry’s Undersecretary Shaikh Nasser bin Abdulrahman Al Khalifa yesterday during a special discussion on the mechanisms of implementing traffic rules and regulations held within the regular session of the House of Representatives.
Shaikh Nasser told the MPs that stricter traffic rules have contributed in saving lives and reducing fatal accidents by a noticeable rate.
In his reply to MPs’ statements and what’s being publicly circulated on local social media networks, claiming that the General Directorate of Traffic is increasingly imposing fines and contraventions to overcome the current deficit in the State’s budget, Shaikh Nasser said, “This is illogical. When the Traffic Law was discussed with the legislators in 2013 and 2014, there was a public petition calling for more deterrent actions against violators of traffic rules. Bahrainis were describing the situations on roads as deadly then. It was discussed and agreed upon with the representatives back then that the best way to curb violators is through increasing the traffic fines. Where’s the injustice in this. We’re only enforcing the laws that were created in this council.”
Shaikh Nasser, who’s also the former General Director of Traffic, displayed some videos and statistics proving that fatal accidents have been remarkably decreased after the new traffic law came into force. He showed that the numbers of deaths caused by traffic accidents reduced from 86 in 2015 to 50 in 2016.
Shaikh Nasser pointed out that the majority of fatal accidents that occurred this year took place inside towns instead of main highways in comparison with the previous years, in a clear hint that stricter supervision should be implemented on secondary roads similarly to main roads, which he described as “considerably controlled with the implementation of the new traffic law”.
“We’re responsible now of following new strategies to meet this new challenge. We have successfully managed to control wrong traffic behaviours on main roads and highways. We can say that we have restored the proper traffic behaviours on main roads. But the violations have moved to secondary roads inside towns and villages. All 19 deadly accidents reported this year occurred inside towns. We’re not talking today about money, we’re discussing lives. This is a successful experiment. When we applied more pressure on roads, people initially complained, but it’s normal and our goal is to save lives,” Shaikh Nasser added.
Several MPs conveyed citizens’ concerns over the implementation of traffic rules and regulations, terming them as “unjust” sometimes, but the Council’s First Deputy Speaker Ali Al Aradi was forced to end the discussion due to lack of quorum, as many MPs left the session and never returned.
Related Posts