Joining other nations, Vietnam last week launched a global effort to reduce road traffic accidents that kill around 1.3 million people a year, 90% of them in low- and middle-income countries, and leave around 50 million others injured or permanently disabled.

The launch of the first global Decade of Action for Road Safety is rare good news for a country that is struggling with rising crashes on the roads. Indeed a bitter truth. Scanning the news both in print and online each day, one can easily see quite a few articles on road crashes with varying degrees of severity. If you’re a skeptic, just check this out by googling the Vietnamese phrase “tai nạn giao thông ở Việt Nam” (traffic accidents in Vietnam). The search returns 2.87 million relevant results in the blink of an eye.

Over the years, the Vietnamese road safety authority has implemented a raft of projects and programs to cope with road traffic accidents as a pressing health and development concern. This has turned out to be just a vain effort. Road deaths and injuries have been steadily growing.

Last year the Vietnam National Traffic Safety Committee failed to obtain its target for a 5% fall in road deaths as crashes on the roads soared by 1,700 from the previous year to 14,400, with 11,400 killed and 10,600 others injured. This year, of course, the roads won’t be safer unless strong actions are to be taken.

This Wednesday, the day governments worldwide responded to the United Nations launching the 2011-2020 global campaign to make roads safe, the Prime Minister of Vietnam admitted he alone could not do anything better to cope with the serious road safety problem. As each day goes by, the Government leader said, road accidents take 33 lives. He called for the masses to join in the effort to cut road accidents as an increasingly big killer, according to VietnamNet online newspaper.

Nonetheless, this is a “how-to” question that remains to be answered.

Minister of Transport Ho Nghia Dung has pointed the finger at a couple of reasons such as wearing substandard crash helmets or none at all, drunk driving, speeding, ballooning vehicle numbers, fast urbanization, and insufficient or poorly developed infrastructure, says a Dan Tri news report.

Those reasons sound familiar just because they have been repeated year after year. Little progress has been made in working out coping measures, though. The media has more than once warned of widespread production and trading of poor-quality safety helmets. However, it’s as easy as pie to buy a dirt-cheap breakable helmet along any of the main streets in HCMC even though there are more than enough rules on quality certification stamps. Where are law enforcement forces?

Driving under the influence of alcohol is rampant in the country. The Prime Minister gave startling figures about drunk driving. Between 80% and 90% of people involved in road accidents were drunk, he said. Once the traffic police launched a campaign with great fanfare to prevent drunk driving by using portable breathalyzers to measure blood alcohol content. But later the hype surrounding this effort died out as the media raised questions about the hygiene of the multiple-use mouthpiece of the breathalyzer. The police did introduce replaceable or washable mouthpieces but it might have been so costly and troublesome that the use of the breathalyzer is virtually non-existent.

The roads seem to be getting smaller and more chaotic, especially in the two largest cities – Hanoi and HCMC. The number of motorized vehicles, particularly motorcycles, has kept snowballing while haphazard road construction and urbanization have apparently become the norm. Motorcycles are seen everywhere in the country, so unsurprisingly, as the Prime Minister put it in Tuoi Tre newspaper, 70% to 80% of road traffic accidents involved motorcycles.

While there is no clear-cut road safety management enhancement solution in sight, especially for motorcyclists, Vietnam’s goal of halving road deaths and injuries by 2020 in response to the Decade of Action for Road Safety campaign will prove to be as hard to achieve as ever.

In an interview with Dan Tri on the sidelines of the launch in Hanoi on Wednesday of the United Nations global road safety campaign, Transport Minister Dung, who is also head of the National Traffic Safety Committee, conceded the severity of the problem. “I cannot say for sure when the Vietnamese are no longer haunted by road traffic accidents.”

Every year an average of around 11,500 people die on the roads nationwide. Dung said this is lower than the world’s average of 13,000 but it might exceed this figure at any time since most Vietnamese road users will still depend on motorcycles as a key means of transport in the next 10 years. This means the scourge will be here to stay, for at least the next decade.

Source: SGT