An average of 17 Saudi Arabian populations die on the country’s roads each day, a crash by the Kingdom’s General Directorate of Traffic has exposed. The news derives after the World Health Organization found Saudi Arabia to have the world’s highest figure of deaths from road accidents, which now make up the nation’s principal cause of death in grown-up males aged 16 to 36. First testified by the Saudi daily Arab News, the study found that 6,485 people had died and more than 36,000 were wounded in over 485,000 traffic accidents throughout 2008 and 2009.
There was no authorized reaction to the unsuccessful world record, and Saudi predictors piercing to larger fundamental difficulties.
The report found that almost a third of traffic accidents in the Saudi capital Riyadh were due to drivers jumping red lights, followed by 18 percent of accidents caused by illegal U-turns. The most common dangerous driving activities were speeding, sudden stops and speaking on the phone while driving.
Over the past two decades Saudi Arabia has recorded 4 million traffic accidents, leading to 86,000 deaths and 611,000 injuries, 7 percent of which resulted in permanent disabilities.
A recent study at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), a Riyadh-based scientific research group, warned that if the current rise in road accident rates is not curbed, Saudi Arabia will have over 4 million traffic accidents a year by 2030.
“You won’t believe what you see,” he told The Media Line. “It’s just crazy.”
“Saudis often try to drift with normal cars and thousands of spectators on the sides of the street,” he said, referring to an informal motor sport in which drivers intentionally over-steer so as to lose traction and drift on the road. “Sometimes the car drifts into the spectators, slamming them into buildings along the sidewalk.”
“Outside the city, the police often cannot stop them,” he said. “The police are actually scared because there can be thousands of them. A few years ago they built a Jeddah raceway to attract young people to do it on the track instead of on the streets, but people still like to do it the old fashioned Bedouin way.”
