Syrian club organises road safety week

Publication date: 20 October 2008

Syria is currently experiencing a major increase in road traffic and in parallel a major increase in road deaths. This led to the Automobile & Touring Club of Syria (ATCS) to organise a road safety week in July 2008, the first such event in the country.

With eight conferences in four days, the project aimed to make 340 people – academics for the most part, but also officials, police officers, firefighters, and young people belonging to various movements – aware of the importance of the road safety problem, and to give them a general idea of the existing means of prevention.

The aim was to promote awareness on a large scale, encouraging young people attending the conferences to become ambassadors, taking the road safety message into the schools, universities, youth clubs and driving schools.

Since 2005, the number of motor vehicles in circulation in the country has trebled and the number of road accidents has also risen steeply, almost doubling between 2002 and 2007.

The two main causes of accidents are excessive speed and the diversity of the traffic. It's not uncommon to see pedestrians and motorists alongside each other on Syria's motorways. The training standards of drivers and the population's level of awareness of the risks of the road are lacking.

Syrian accident statistics are largely underestimated. Further, apart from a few exceptions, the state of the roads and of the road signs and markings is very poor. Road design is rarely centred around safety concerns. To compound the problem, the rescue services are underequipped and they often take far too long to intervene.

Recently, the Syrian authorities passed more restrictive laws, such as obligation to wear a seat belt in the front and to wear a helmet when on a motorcycle, accompanied by dissuasive fines. Within the country road safety is starting to be considered as a priority, linked to the development of the future. Major investment projects are currently under way or being planned in several fields of transport, including urban and interurban public transport and road infrastructures.

At the same time, the cost of road accidents in Syria is rising, currently representing around 2 per cent of the gross domestic product.

In parallel with this initiative, and within the framework of this campaign, a road safety education booklet, intended for children, has been produced. Thanks to the contribution of the Touring Club Suisse (TCS), in particular by providing drawings and information, this booklet has been published by the ATCS and printed in a run of 36,000 copies.

The booklet was handed out in summer schools during the school holidays in 2008, as well as directly to parents and motorists in the streets of the town, so that they could discuss the subject with their children at home.