Health Office launches road safety campaign

Meanwhile, Highway Police chief Maj-General Somchai Kaosamran said 2,300 highway police officers would be deployed to handle traffic congestion and facilitate travel in the holiday season.
Somchai said many road casualties were a result of drunk driving and dozing off behind the wheel. He promised that police would be tougher in cracking down on motorists drinking while driving or while using highways. He urged motorists to rest a bit at the department’s 196 pit stops along highways. He said they could also call hotline 1193 for road accidents or emergencies.
During the NHCO campaign launch, Road Safety Centre director Thanapong Jinwong noted that the United Nations had set the year 2011-2020 as the decade of road safety. Thailand could accordingly reduce road fatalities to be less than 10 per 100,000 population by 2020. “Despite road-safety measures since 2011, the road toll remains high, and is not going down,” he said, citing statistics about Thai death certificate issuance. Thanapong said 14,033 Thais had died from road accidents in 2011, which rose to 14,059 in 2012.
He said road fatalities in 2013-2014 were about 14,000 per year or about 38 deaths per day and this daily figure doubled during festival time such as New Year or Songkran.
Thanapong said the World Health Organisation has reported that Thai road toll was the world’s third-highest at 38.1 deaths per 100,000 population, behind only the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean and the South Pacific island of Niue.
He urged eliminating risky factors by campaigning for Thais to refrain from reckless speeding, drunk driving, suddenly cutting in front of another vehicle, not wearing a helmet or seatbelt, besides having the authorities repair roads. He also called for tougher traffic law enforcement and social pressure.

Create integrity
“A survey said road repairs at dangerous spots or expanding road shoulders had been more effective in reducing accidents than the wear-a-helmet campaign because changing Thais’ habits is hard. The [helmet] campaign wasn’t strong enough and police’s traffic law enforcement wasn’t consistent,” he added.
Urging all related parties to work continuously to reduce the number of road accidents, Thanapong said the upcoming Songkran could be a chance to create integrity among agencies and organisations.
Kanchana Thongtua, a member of a committee that forwards and follows up on NHCO resolutions, said road-safety campaigns must not depend on civil society alone, and a state agency with related mission and budget should launch the campaign. She urged replacing the use of fatality figures as an assessment criteria with measuring implementation of anti-road accident efforts so that the outcomes would be more effective.
Citing the “Nonthaburi Model” as an example, the Nonthaburi Provincial Administrative Organisation deputy clerk Sathporn Siutthi-laor said his office hosted measures at in-between areas while municipalities were in charge of their jurisdictions. The organisation’s measures in the past decade included installing over 100 CCTV cameras at intersections and risky spots (plus a Bt3-million budget for camera maintenance per year); training many thousands of traffic volunteers to help tackle heavy jams and constructing roads that meet safety standards, he said.