Road Traffic Safety

Road safety has become a global issue of concern and concrete effort needs to be adopted at the ground level to abate the thousands of lives being lost in road traffic accidents around the world. One of the important and cogent measures for subsidising road crashes fatalities is continuously improving and maintaining good shapes and conditions of our roads. The design of roads plays paramount role in terms of road safety. This study provides strategies and measures that are concrete to tail off the problem through multi-faceted methods which involve effective road engineering solutions at the design stage. The purpose of the study was to assess road infrastructure situation in Ghana and provide effective measures to recede the problem. The study seeks to measure how roads are maintained with frequent relaying of road surfaces and markings of road safety signs and also to assess the condition of pedestrian's footpaths and pedestrians crossing at intersection and measure availability of road signs and signals, pavement, and road lanes. Cross sectional study design was used to collect data. Ashanti region of Ghana was used as a case study. Open and close ended questions and also focus group discussions were used to collect data from the respondents. The study participants were made up of road users (motor vehicle users and pedestrians), and stakeholders within road infrastructure management. The study participants were 217. The study found that, road infrastructure in the region is strongly associated with road traffic accidents in the region.

Road crash injuries have emerged as a major health problem and have posed serious social and economic challenges around the globe. Traffic safety can be improved only through adequate safety measures if the underlying factors are well understood. Factors affecting crashes in developing countries, like Pakistan, are less studied in the literature. Also, the road crash injuries data reporting and recording systems in these countries are not well established. As such, this study by using the data from multiple sources including World Health Organization (WHO), International Road Federation (IRF) and World Bank (WB) compares the reported non-fatal road crash injuries of Pakistan using two different approaches. First, the road crash injury rates were compared with different groups of countries around the globe using two different indicators: (1) injuries per hundred thousand population and (2) injuries per thousand registered vehicles. Results indicated lower road crash injury rates Pakistan relative to other countries. Using the same indicators as response variables, linear regression models were estimated using Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression. The total number of registered vehicles, maximum speed on rural roads, enforcement level of the seatbelt law, income level, and safety audit of new roads were found as significant explanatory variables. The average values of these variables were compared with those in the country. Finally, using the number of injuries as the response variables, count data models were developed and the number of road crash injuries for Pakistan were estimated and compared with the reported number of road crash injuries. The estimated road crash injuries were 4.5 times higher than the number of reported injuries.