Drivers lack safety awareness

JAKARTA (JP): Lack of safety awareness is the main cause of road accidents, a study has found.

Speeding caused most accidents on toll roads, particularly the Jakarta-Cikampek turnpike, Ministry of Public Works researchers said yesterday.

On non-toll roads, lack of discipline was the largest cause of accidents which mostly killed motorcyclists and pedestrians, members of the Ministry's Institute of Road Engineering said.

"This is typical of city and inter-city roads elsewhere in Asia," Hikmat Iskandar, one of the researchers, said during a break at a five-day road safety workshop which ends Friday.

Police records show Indonesia has had at least 10,000 road deaths annually, and many more injuries, over the past 10 years.

Hikmat said most accidents on the Jakarta-Cikampek toll road involved single vehicles, particularly small trucks.

"They speed above the limit of 100 kilometers per hour," he said.

Another researcher, Poernomosidhi Poerwo, said road users were yet to learn about what activities were allowed on different types of road.

"For instance, it is dangerous to load and unload construction material on the side of an artery road," Poernomosidhi said.

The Institute and the Swedish International Development Agency is organizing the workshop.

Sweden's ambassador Mikael Lindstrom said the workshop aimed to share Sweden's road safety experience. Sweden has one of the world's best road accident records based on a ratio comparing the number of accidents to the number of vehicles a country has.

A representative from Swedish National Road Consulting AB, Karl-Lennart Bang, said educating road users and builders to have a sense of responsibility about the safety of fellow road users was a long process.

"Police enforcement is very important," he said.

The researchers said although wearing helmets was mandatory, most motorcyclists did not wear them properly.

The quality of helmets was also sub-standard, Poernomosidhi said.

The researchers said many roads were built not taking safety into account.

Poernomosidhi said corruption was a possible reason behind the building of poor quality roads.

"But what is definite is that we lack discipline in following standard procedures," Poernomosidhi said.

For example, road projects were not adequately equipped with temporary traffic signs warning road users, he said. (anr)