SRI LANKA: More Road Deaths Come with Boom Times, Experts

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 5 2003 (IPS) - Permanent peace in war-battered Sri Lanka will not only see prosperity – like many other countries recovering from conflict – but could also lead to more deaths on the road, experts say.

”Sri Lanka is heading the way of Vietnam. Economic prosperity there after the war, 25 years ago, has resulted in more vehicles on the roads and more road deaths,” said Do Tu Anh, executive director of the Asia Injury Prevention Foundation, a non-profit road safety campaigner based in

Sri Lanka last month celebrated a year of peace during a 20-year old ethnic conflict, following an ceasefire between Tamil rebels and government troops in February 2002.

In Vietnam, the economic prosperity that came with years of peace has also led to increasing motorisation. This has led to a boom in the use of motorcycles, which has in turn made road deaths a major health risk especially for young men, many of them breadwinners for their families.

Less than two percent of the riders in Vietnam wear helmets and over 60 percent of the road fatalities are caused by head injuries, prompting efforts to increase safety awareness and to make helmets socially desirable.

Yet Sri Lanka and Vietnam are far from the only countries where road deaths are a public concern. Every year, nearly one million people are killed on roads in Asia, which has only a quarter of the world’s total vehicle population but accounts for 50 percent of road deaths globally.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that fatalities from road accidents will be the third leading cause of premature death in the world.

Now, road safety experts are keen to use the Vietnam model to make roads safe for travel in Sri Lanka.

”Think about HIV/AIDS and how it exploded in the 1990s. Deaths from road accidents is something similar and can impact on economies and public health in the same way,” said Greig Craft, the founder of Asia Injury who was in Colombo this week to launch a ‘Safe Roads’ initiative for Sri Lanka.

S M Wickremesinghe, director of traffic at Sri Lanka’s police department, says that over 10,500 people have died in road accidents in the past five years on the country’s highly congested 26,000 km road network.

In the same period there have been 260,000 accidents causing injuries to 76,000 people, in this country of 19 million people. Though some 40 percent or more of the population are poor, there are 1.7 million vehicles on the roads, replenished by the entry of 100,000 more every year.

Wickremesinghe says the loss to the economy owing to traffic accidents is estimated at two billion rupees (20.6 million U.S. dollars) a year.

In Sri Lanka, Asia Injury plans to establish a driver-training centre and a five-year, 1.3 million U.S. dollar public awareness and education campaign, says Craft, a U.S. businessman who went to Vietnam in 1989 and a decade later launched Asia Injury.

Wickremesinghe, whose office launched a new parking system on key roads in the capital on Monday to ease traffic congestion, says there are one million people who visit Colombo daily, travelling in 360,000 trains, buses, cars, motorcycles, three-wheeler scooter taxis and bicycles.

Many traffic accident victims are poor or come from the middle classes and only a well-planned road safety scheme can address this, Wickremesinghe adds.

Apart from Sri Lanka, Asia Injury is also undertaking road safety projects in Bangladesh and Nepal, looking at problems unique to those countries.

Asia Injury, after a six-month study ending last December of the road safety situation here, found that lack of awareness and bad driving due to lack of training are the main causes of road accidents in Sri Lanka.

There are lessons to learn, experts say, from Vietnam. There, the number of motorbikes rose from less than 500,000 in 1992, to 10.5 million in 2002. ”With prosperity and rebuilding after the war, road deaths were rising,” said Anh, co-founder of Asia Injury.

Helmets were seen as ugly, uncomfortable and socially unacceptable, a view that Asia Injury tried to address through its Helmets for Kids programme.

Craft says imported helmets were uncomfortable because ”Asian heads are different in size to Caucasian heads.” This led to Anh’s developing the first child motorbike helmet to suit local needs, soon to become the standard helmet in Vietnam

Craft established the world’s first non-profit helmet factory in Vietnam, which helps Asia Injury donate helmets to the poor and sell the rest. ”We changed behavioural patterns and made helmets stylish, intelligent and fun to wear,” he said. Asia Injury’s Sri Lanka study reveals that although the country has comprehensive safety plans, they are under-funded and poorly organised,

While alcohol appears to be a far larger problem than is officially acknowledged in Sri Lanka, there are virtually no counter-measures such as public education and anti-drunk driving campaigns and no legal ability to deter drunk drivers.

Law enforcement on the roads is also weak due to lack of sufficient traffic police. ”The level of safety of Sri Lanka’s road systems is influenced by the bad behaviour of all road users, not only driver behaviour including pedestrians, hand-drawn carts, bicycles, rickshaws, auto rickshaws, motorcycles, buses, cars, bicycles and even livestock and buffalo,” the report by Asia Injury said.

Lori Moren, a social scientist and the former head of road safety in the Australian state of New South Wales, says that in the end, road safety is a development issue for many countries.

The loss per year owing to road accidents is twice the 100 billion U.S. dollars worth of multilateral and bilateral aid to developing countries, she said. ”This is a direct burden to the government in terms of the cost of health. Less road accidents means vital resources can be channelled to other productive areas in the economy,” said Moren.