By Vestnik Kavkaza
The International Remembrance Day of Traffic Incident Victims is marked annually on the third Sunday of November. Every year 1.3 million people in the world die in traffic accidents. Traffic accidents are the main reasons for death of young people aged from 15 to 29. Most of them are caused by drunken driving and speeding.
Vladimir Kuzmin, the deputy head of the Road Policing Unit of the Russian Internal Ministry, major general of the police
The authorities of the country define serious courses in this sphere. Significant sums are allocated for providing safe road traffic. In 2006 a decree was adopted, which ratified the federal target program on road traffic safety. I should say it comes to an end this year. But work on road traffic safety won’t be stopped. Today the concept of the federal target program on providing road traffic safety was adopted for 2013-2020. Unfortunately, tendencies of recent years show that the measures taken are not sufficient. The number of traffic accidents is growing, even though the growth is small. Yes, we have discussed that, due to the federal target program, we saved about 10 thousand lives from 2004 to 2012. This is a serious figure. However, the statistics are sad. What should we do? We often see sad accidents happen on Russian roads in TV-news, other countries have the same problem too. It means that we have to change something in this sphere. Traffic accidents of recent months made legislators understand that punishments for not only causing an accident, but also violation of traffic rules should be stiffened. Of course we cannot solve the problem by repressions only. This subject demands a systemic decision.
Kanat Sadvakasov, the head of the coordination and providing safe road-traffic department of the traffic police committee of the Internal Ministry of Kazakhstan
11149 traffic accidents were registered in 10 months of 2012 in the republic’s roads. They caused death of 2393 people and injured 13652 people. In comparison with the same period of 2011 the growth of all three indexes is observed – by 15%, 17% and 21% accordingly. That is why the Internal Ministry developed a project of a new law on road traffic. The operating law on safe road traffic was adopted in 1996. Today it doesn’t correlate with the reality at full extent. The main targets of the new law on road traffic are consolidations of legal norms in the sphere of road traffic and improvement of the role of legislative control, definition of rights and duties of participants of road traffic. Previously they were controlled by a governmental decree which contradicted norms of the constitution in a way. It is also planned that central and local executive bodies will get more functions in the sphere of providing safe road traffic; new instruments will be launched. At the moment we are implementing the security audit of road traffic, and roads and vehicles will be considered within this system.
Ramiz Guseinov, deputy head of the chief department of the state traffic police of Azerbaijan
Road traffic is intensively developing in the Azerbaijani Republic. The number of vehicles has grown in 2.5 times in recent 10 years – it is more than a million. About 4 thousand km of roads were reconstructed and built. A lot of bridges, crossovers, crosswalks were constructed.
The main factors of traffic accidents are overspeeding, violation of passing rules and passing through crossroads. Using of mobile radars which register speed enables us to control the factor of overspeeding. Due to it the number of traffic accidents reduced by 10% in the last year. The role of state traffic police significantly improved. Its material-technical base is being modernized.
Thus, we can see certain positive results. The tendency for reduction of accidents, mortality rate, and injury rate is observed. Close cooperation between the police and the health care and the emergency units reduces time of coming to a place of an accident. We are focused on legal working with young people, teenagers, and children. Various contests on safe road traffic are being conducted in schools and universities.
Nevertheless, problems are still acute. We try to overcome them and find effective methods. We need experience of friendly countries, we are studying the European practice. At the moment we continue working on new projects and programs. The transport system of Azerbaijan is being improved.
