For making roads safer for travelers by cutting traffic accident deaths to zero, Qatar has taken a number of initiatives in recent years from enacting of new laws to strict imposition of road-safety rules and regulations.
Owing to such focused efforts by the concerned authorities, Qatar today is leading the Gulf region in traffic safety. The road accident mortality rate has fallen from 14 deaths per 100,000 people in 2013 to 5.4 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017. Under this vision of achieving the goal of zero road-accident deaths, the General Directorate of Traffic, represented by the Traffic Awareness
Department, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Hamad Medical Corporation’s (HMC) Hamad Trauma Center on scientific partnership and cooperation and the prevention of road traffic injuries.
The MoU was signed by Director of Traffic Awareness Department at the General Directorate of Traffic Lt Col. Mohammad Radhi Al Hajri and Head of Hamad Trauma Center, Dr Sheikh Hassan Al Thani. The MoU aims to promote communication and cooperation between both sides on awareness about traffic safety in the community and the most vulnerable groups in the country.
In addition, the MoU aims to extend information on risks to those involved in awareness programs, the prevention of injuries caused by traffic accidents and to spread up-to-date and accurate traffic safety information in cooperation with the media.
The MoU also aims to exchange best practices on traffic safety in Qatar in the fields of monitoring, databases, prevention, and handling injuries caused by traffic accidents with various State entities.
The cooperation also covers conducting research and issuing joint publications to improve existing practices with respect to traffic safety in the State, according to the requirements of the research ethics rules issued by the Institutional Review Board, medical research centers and HMC.
Recently in the last week of November, Qatar also hosted the International Traffic Safety Conference in which representatives from several countries around the world and a number of traffic safety experts from governmental entities participated.
Addressing the conference, Major General Mohamed Saad al Kharji, Vice-Chairman of the National Traffic Safety Committee had said that the second phase of the implementation plan for the National Traffic Safety Strategy (2018-2022), which was launched in 2018, was underway.
“This requires exceptional efforts, cooperation from all sides, and adoption of an unprecedented mechanism of implementation to address traffic problems, and the achievement of 2022 goals with high efficiency and on time.”
The conference tackled a number of different topics such as traffic safety engineering, driving behaviour, road users at risk, legal enforcement, post-accident investigations, internal vehicle technology, transport safety and security, intelligent transportation systems, traffic flow, road design, public transport, among other topics.
