Road accidents in Saudi Arabia: a comparative and analytical study A.S.Al-Ghamdi College ofengineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Transcription

1 Road accidents in Saudi Arabia: a comparative and analytical study A.S.Al-Ghamdi College ofengineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Abstract This study analyses the magnitude of traffic accidents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KS A) over the last fifteen years. The Kingdom has experienced a rapid economic growth resulting in a large increase in auto ownership and a rapidly expanding improved road network. As a result, traffic accidents have become a serious problem facing the country. During the period from 1971 to 1994, the numbers of traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities have increased by 30 times, 6 times, and 7 times, respectively. A comparative analysis of the traffic accident experience versus other developing countries is carried out. The relative situation of traffic safety impacts is compared with developing countries experiencing rapid economic expansion. This study showed that both fatality rate and accident severity have increased. The need for improvement is urgently demonstrated by the magnitude. 1 Introduction The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KS A) has experienced a rapid economic growth since the oil boom in 1973 resulting in an enormous increase in the motorization rate (vehicle per 1000 population) associated with a rapidly expanding road network construction. The number of registered vehicles has increased from 144,768 in 1970 to 5,861,614 in 1994, a forty-fold increase in 24 years/ This growth in motorization has been accompanied with a dramatic increase in the size of the road network in the country. The length of paved roads has increased from 8500 km in 1970 to 43,003 km in 1992, a nearly fivefold increase in 22 years/ As a result of this enormous growth in motorization and the road-network size, traffic accidents have become a serious problem facing this developing country. The number of drivers has also proportionally increased as large.

2 232 Urban Transport and the Environment During the period from 1971 to 1994, the numbers of traffic accidents, injuries, and fatalities have increased by 30 times, 6 times, and 7 times, respectively (see Table 1 and Fig.l). Fig. 2 depicts that during the period while fatality rates (per person) increased by 157%, the fatality rates (per vehicle) decreased by 82%. This figure also shows that there were tendencies for fatality and injury rates per vehicle to decrease and to increase per person over time. Such trends agree with what Smeed^ found. Bener and Jadaan* found that road traffic fatalities is at the top of the list of major causes of death in this country. Statistics from the USA National Safety Council* ranked road traffic fatalities as the third most common cause of death in all age group. Table 1. Population, registered vehicles, and traffic accident statistics ( ). Year Sources: [1,13]. Population in millions Registered vehicle Accidents Injury Fatality

3 Urban Transport and the Environment 233 S E 5 S S 5 S S S S S S S S S S S S Fig. 1. Trends in registered vehicles, accidents, injuries, and fatalities. Fig. 2. Trends in accident rates per vehicle and per person in KSA ( ) Year The size of the problem can be shown by comparing accident severity and cost in KSA with those of the USA, as presented in Table 2. The table reveals that the percentage of injury accidents in KSA is almost double that in the USA. The percentage of fatal accidents in KSA is 2.6% and the corresponding percentage for the USA is This is more than eight times.

4 234 Urban Transport and the Environment The cost of a traffic accident in KSA is 1.7 times greater than that in the USA. These percentages and numbers show that the loss of life and the accompanied economic loss to the country are large when compared with the USA. Statistics have also shown that more than about eighty percent of all reported accidents occurred in KSA during the last five years ( ) were attributed to the driver/ Therefore, it is of primary importance to study driver-related factors (human factors) that may contribute to the traffic accident problem. Table 2. Severity and cost of accidents for KSA and USA. Item Severity of accident PDO Injury Fatal Total accidents Total cost (billion) Cost per accident Sources: [1,6,24]. KSA (1993) 82.1% 15.3% 2.6% 85,277 $4.96 $58,163 US A (1992) 91.6% 8.0% 0.313% 11,900,000 $407.5 $34,202 The objective of this study is twofold: 1) to discuss the magnitude of traffic accidents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the last fifteen years and to compare the situation of traffic safety with that of other countries and 2) to analyze road accidents with more emphasis on human factors issues and causal events. The first objective will be achieved by examining changes in accident rates over the past two decades and comparing these rates with those in some developing countries (e.g., Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Mexico) The definition of developed and developing contries is not given herein. World Bank relates this definition to gross national product (GNP) per capita^-and developed countries (e.g., USA, UK, Sweden, Germany, and Canada) by using Smeed's formula. The second objective will be attained by analyzing data obtained from police records using statistical techniques such as odds ratio and proportion comparisons. 2 Data sources and limitations In order to quantify the magnitude of the traffic-accident problem, accident data should be available and reliable. In many countries, especially in the developed world, data may come from different sources, including police, insurance, and hospital records. The situation, however, is different in developing countries, where the only sort of data is the police.^'^'^ In these countries, the police accident data are not collected with a view to providing research information but for the purposes of enforcement, safety and litigation. *'*

5 Urban Transport and the Environment 235 Therefore, such data do not often have detailed information to carry out in-depth analysis and research. Similar to other developing countries, the main source of road accident data in KSA is the police. The Publication of Road Accident Statistics, a yearly publication by the General Directorate of Traffic, Ministry of Interior/ contains all reported accidents with information related to the driver (e.g., age, education, and marital status) and the accident (type, cause, time, and severity). Such data reveal three main problems with police records: > > (1) Until 1991, accident data were restricted to the fatal and injury accidents (i.e., no consideration for including property-damage-only (PDO) accidents), (2) Deficiency in the typical reporting system exists due to incomplete, unclear, and/or incorrect data, and (3) The filing and report system is primitive (i.e., reports are filled manually and no computerization is made to maintain data). Also, the reliability of police reports is questionable related to causal events because policemen are not trained as engineers and look for prosecution data rather than engineering problems. "*" Thus, researchers face difficulties in collecting accident data due to manual searching in the files and the other underlying problems just mentioned. In this study, a great effort was made to obtain data from police records and to extract other nations' data from literature. 3 Accident rates compared Three known measures can be used for accident comparisons when related to motorization rate (vehicles per 1000 persons (V/P)): 1) fatalities per 10,000 persons (F/P), 2) fatalities per 1000 vehicles (F/V), and 3) fatalities per 100 million vehicle kilometers (F/VK). The last one (F/VK) is the best measure for making reliable comparisons among nations since it takes into consideration the total amount of travel. However, this measure is not available for KSA. Therefore, the other two measures (F/P and F/V) are used herein for comparison purposes. Fig. 3 (based on very recent data)*'^ shows that road accident fatality rates (i.e., deaths per 10,000 vehicles) are high in developing countries, very often more than 5 times greater than for those countries of Western Europe and North America (Jacobs and Sayer^ reported 20 times based on 1970s data). Among 40 nations, KSA ranks the 25th as depicted in Fig. 3. About 8 persons per 10,000 vehicles are killed in traffic accidents in KSA. Taking into account motorization level, the interpretation of this rate is different as discussed below.

6 236 Urban Transport and the Environment Fig.3. Death rates for various developing and developed countries. The work of Smeed^ on data from developed countries have shown that there were tendencies for fatality rates per vehicle to decrease and per person to increase over time. Fig. 2 suggests that the same findings of Smeed apply to KSA as well. It is obvious from the figure that when accidents, injuries, and fatalities are related to population, the rate increases with time. However, when these items are related to registered vehicles, the rate decreases. Smeed represented the trend for fatality rate per vehicle in the following form: - a F It follows from the above formula that, the death rate per registered vehicle, V y decreases as, the proportion of vehicles in population (motorization), increases. Smeed applied this formula on data from 20 developed countries and found that the death rate is varying approximately inversely as the two-thirds power of the proportion of vehicles to the population. In other words, he found that a and (3 are and 2/3, respectively. Applying Smeed's formula on data from 35 developing countries, Jacobs and Cutting^ found that a and J3 are and 0.64, respectively. In addition they repeated the earlier work of Smeed on data from developed countries and found that a and f! are and 0.72, respectively, indicating that the fatality rates based on registered vehicles in these countries have decreased between 1938 and (1)

7 Urban Transport and the Environment 237 In this study, Smeed' formula was used on KSA data for the period from 1971 to 1994 (Table 1). A regression technique is employed to estimate a and /?. The linear transformation of eqn (1) was first obtained by taking its logarithm: F frv^ log y = log a^-j (2) and hence F V logy = log a-/? log- (3) The linear transformation was then regressed to give the following model: log = log (^ =92%) (4) By taking the antilog of the above model, the values of a and J3 for the case of KSA were found to be and 0.795, respectively. Thus, the modified Smeed's formula for the KSA data becomes: - = (5) The fitted values obtained from this model along with actual fatality rates are plotted against motorization level in Fig. 4. The model shows reasonable fit. When plotted over time ( ), actual and modeled data show a downward trend indicating that an overall improvement in safety levels have been achieved over these years (Fig. 5). Yet, it is obvious from this figure that the last five years ( ) have depicted a slow raising trend in fatality rates implying that safety levels show no improvement lately. This increasing trend was also detected using time series modeling in earlier studies conducted by the author."-"

8 238 Urban Transport and the Environment V/PilOOO Fig.4. Actual and fitted values for relationship between death rate and motorization. Fig. 5. Actual and fitted values for death rates over years. When actual rates are plotted with fitted curves of developing and developed countries found by Jacobs and Cutting,^ the level of traffic safety in terms of death per vehicle achieved shows a significant improvement with the increase of motorization as shown in Fig. 6. For example, at the level of motorization level of 300 and above, the majority of points are below the

9 Urban Transport and the Environment 239 developing curve. country curve and become closer with the developed countries O VXPxlOOO Fig.6. Smeed's fitted curves for KSA, developing and developed countries. Fig. 7 illustrates fatality rates related to motorization levels for fourteen countries. The figure shows both fitted curves for developed and developing countries obtained by Jacobs and Cutting.^ It can be concluded from this figure that KSA lies almost under the fitted line for developing countries. This implies that in relative to its motorization level, KSA has a low fatality rate compared to those of other developing countries. On the other hand, KSA lies relatively far above the fitted curve of developed countries suggesting that its fatality rate is still high compared to those of developed countries. It is also apparent from this figure that KSA is relatively in a reasonable position among other countries. For example, KSA has a higher motorization level than some other countries (e.g., Egypt, South Korea, Jordan, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), while its fatality rate is yet much lower.

10 240 Urban Transport and the Environment Fig.7. KSA and other countries with the fitted curves for developing and developed. 4 Accident severity using odds ratio A commonly used technique in the analysis of categorical data is the examination of odds ratios (co). Refer to Table 3. Within row 1, the odds that the response is in column 1 instead of column 2 is defined to be D^ =^11/^21- Within row 2, the corresponding odds equals fij - n^ I n^. The odds ratio is simply the ratio of these two odds:^ " "^ (6) ^21 ",2^21 Table 3. A typical 2x2 table for categorical data. Rows 1 2 Totals Columns 1 2 "ll «U "21 "u HI Hj Totals 4 "2 n The odds ratio (non negative number) is also termed the cross-product ratio and the approximate relative risk.^ Taking the year of 1971 as a reference, the odds ratios of fatalities among accident victims (injuries + fatalities) with 95% confidence intervals (c!)e***) were computed for the years from 1972 to 1994 as presented in

11 Urban Transport and the Environment 241 Table 4 and plotted in Fig. 8. That is, the measure of odds ratio is used in this study as a severity index to asses the levels of accident severity over time. Table 4. Estimated odds ratio (severity index) and 95% confidence limits. Year Severity Index (Odds Ratio) % Confidence Interval Upper Limit Lower Limit For illustration, Table 5 gives the frequencies of fatalities and injuries for 1994 and 1971 in KSA. The odds ratio computed from this table using eqn (6) is 1.02 (co = 1.02).This is an estimate of the population odds ratio but it is not that far from 1. It means that the odds of a victim being killed in a traffic accident that occurred in 1991 equals to the odds of a victim being killed in a traffic accident occurred in Table 5. 2x2 for accident victims in 1971 and Year Totals Vietims Fatality Injury 4,077 32, ,647 36,716 Totals 36,210 5,153 41,363

12 242 Urban Transport and the Environment Thus, the levels of accident severity in 1971 and 1994 are almost even. This suggests that no improvement in this dimension seems to have taken place between these two points of time. Yet, it should be perceived from Fig. 8 that, overall, since 1985 the levels of severity have shown some sign of improvement compared to the period between 1975 and The maximum severity was observed in 1977 where the odds ratio equals to 1.51 indicating that the odds of a victim being killed in a traffic accident occurred in 1977 was 1.5 (one and a half) times as large as the odds of a victim being killed in a traffic accident occurred in The severity over the past five years has displayed a general increase. Fig.8. Accident severity represented by odds ratio. 5 Factors contributing to accidents Traffic accidents can be attributed to human, vehicular, and environmental factors. When considered alone, human factors have been found to contribute to 57 percent of the accidents in the developed countries. Together with vehicular and environmental factors, human factors account for about 92 percent of the accidents.^ The following sections discuss road, vehicular and human factors. 5.1 Road factors Despite more than two decades of modern road building in KSA, knowledge of the safety consequences of highway design decisions is limited. The Ministry of Communications is responsible for road design and construction

13 Urban Transport and the Environment 243 in the country. This agency relies on design standard implemented in developed countries. Engineering data for investigating relationships between safety and highway design features are not available due to the problems with the current accident reporting system mentioned earlier. 5.2 Vehicular factors According to police data* about 5% (compared to 1.6% in USA/of road accidents in KSA were attributed to vehicular factors. In many developed countries 2 to 20 percent of accidents have been related to such factors.^ KSA has started a periodic Motor Vehicle Inspection Program (MVIP) in All vehicles must be inspected on an annual basis. The program gives more attention to the vehicle tires, lights, steering and braking system. Recently, inspection stations of MVIP cover 90% of the country^. Ergurn" found that the average condition of vehicles in KSA is worse than that of vehicles in some USA states (Missouri, California, and Pennsylvania). Furthermore, he observed that there was a strong relationship between driver characteristics (e.g., income and education) and vehicle condition. Unfortunately, no in-depth studies have been conducted on the role of various vehicle defects in accident causation in KSA. However, it appears from statistics that involvement of such factors is very small (about 5%) compared with that of human errors. 5.3 Human factors As mentioned earlier, about eighty percent of accidents reported in KSA during 1994 were attributed to drivers and driver error. Lee^ evaluated human factors on traffic accidents in Riyadh (The capital of KSA) and reported very close percentage (84%). Hence, studying human factors such as age, nationality, and education is of interest. Several variables related to the driver are analyzed below Age Among other age groups, drivers of year old are more involved in road accidents, as illustrated in Fig.9.a. It should be stated that drivers less than 40 year old (an important slice of society needed badly in this developing country) represent about 68% of all drivers involved in accidents. More than one third of those drivers stayed in hospitals for treatments.^ This indicates how much accidents are a high economic and social cost to a country. Teenage drivers are involved in 2.05% of all accidents occurred in USA during 1993.* The corresponding percentage for KSA is about 7%, i.e. three times greater Nationality Non-Saudis account for about 38% of the country population,^ yet they are involved in 44 percent of accidents. In other words, Saudis and non-saudis

14 244 Urban Transport and the Environment are almost equally involved in road accidents (Fig.9.b). This may be attributed to the presence of expatriates from all over the world. The drivers of this population come from different cultures with different habits and attitudes. Thus, the wide differences in their backgrounds and driving behavior may create traffic-safety-related problems. This raises the difficulty of trying to address the traffic safety problem. There may need to be provided a unique educational and training program developed in cooperation with the diplomatic sector for each nationality Marital Status According to police data, married drivers have found to be involved in more accidents than single ones, as shown in Fig. 9.c. Yet, the percentage of the two groups are very close. It should be stated that based on Islamic rules women are not allowed to drive in KS A. Therefore, female drivers are not involved in this analysis Education Data from police records indicate that 20% of drivers involved in road accidents in KSA over the period had never attended school and were illiterate (Fi.g.9.d). This group in the population of drivers needs a special consideration from traffic safety planners during public awareness campaigns. The interesting observation is that the percentage of illiterate drivers has reduced from 31% in the period to 20% in the period , a 11% decrease. It should be mentioned that no data is available to lead us to know the proportion of illiterate drivers in the whole population of drivers in order to conduct more reliable comparison between the two groups of drivers in terms of education Driver's License Fig. 11 depicts the percentages of drivers without a driver's license involved in accidents in the country over the fifteen year period ( ). During that period the percent reached its peak (69.5%) in 1983 and decreased drastically to 11 percent in Although the percentage of drivers committed this violation has achieved a remarkable reduction between the two five-year periods as given in Table 6 (from 34% to 14%, statistically significant at 0.05 level), this percentage increased steadily in the past five years (i.e., from 11% in 1990 to 19% in 1994 (Fig.9.e)). This may raise questions about law enforcement measures for unlicensed drivers.

15 Urban Transport and the Environment Saudi Other Nationality (a) Age factor. (b) Nationality factor. 100 Married Not married Marital status (c) Marital-status factor. Literate Illiterate Education status (d) Education factor. 100 (e) Licensee status. Fig.9. Distributions of accidents by variables related to the driver.

16 246 Urban Transport and the Environment 100 Day Night Time of accident Day (a) Time occurrence factor. Distribution by day. 100 Urban Rural Location of accident (c) Location factor i S" «: %.2-31 a. Type of accident (d) Accident-type factor. fill!!i il Cause of accident (e) Accident-cause factor. Fig. 10. Accident characteristics ( ).

17 Urban Transport and the Environment Yew- Fig. 11. Percentages of unlicensed drivers involved in road accidents ( ). Table 6. Proportions of three violations committed during the two periods. Violation Speed* Run-red-light** Unlicensed.* * Reject HQ at 0.05 level. ** Accept H^ at 0.05 level. "i 157, , , * 99,679 17,974 65,239 A /\ 353, , , ; ': 148,219 54, , 551 P* Accident characteristics In this section, typical characteristics of road accidents are analyzed. These characteristics include accident time, location, type, and cause. Through the analysis the percentages of some characteristics are compared with those in the USA. 6.1 Time of occurrence Government statistics* indicate that 63% of traffic accidents occur during day time (Fi.g.lO.a). This is a large percentage when compared to that of US A

18 248 Urban Transport and the Environment (48%). Moreover, fatality rates are higher in daytime in KSA. Yet, fatality crash rates during nighttime are much higher in USA than daytime rates.* In fact they are almost five times higher. The reason could be the smaller percentage of night travel in KSA due to the lack of night entertainment places, low level of industrialization (work time is between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.), and social habits related to traditions. Further, alcohol consumption, which is considered a major causal effect of accidents in other countries, is forbidden in KSA. In terms of days, Fig. 10.b gives the distribution of accident percentages by day of the week. It can be observed that the accident occurrence is almost uniformly distributed over days. In other words, the likelihood of accident occurrence in any day of the week is roughly even. 6.2 Location of occurrence Fig. 10. c show that the majority of traffic accidents (80%) occur inside the cities. This may reflect the huge amount of travel (vehicle kilometers) driven within urban areas. Although it is expected that the severity of rural accidents (death per accident) is higher than that of urban accidents, this can not be confirmed for KSA due to the lack of detailed data. A study conducted by the author** showed that 53% of urban accidents that occurred in Riyadh were intersection related and more than half of these accidents were right-angle collisions due to running the red light. 6.3 Types of accidents The official statistics in KSA classify accident types into two categories: 1) collisions (i.e., with other motor vehicle(s), pedestrians, fixed objects, and animal), and 2) noncollision (i.e., roll-over and off-road). Table 7 gives the percentages for classifications under the two categories for KSA and USA. Both countries have almost a uniform distribution for accident types except for collision with pedestrians (KSA is about six times greater) and collision with animal (USA is about four times greater). The percentages of accidents by type is given in Fig. 10.d. 6.4 Causes of accidents The distribution of accidents by cause is shown in Fig. 10.e. Among other causes, violating speed limit ranks first followed by running the red light. Nearly 60% of accidents were attributed to speeding in excess of the posted speed limit and failure to obey the traffic signal indication. About forty-two percent of accidents were attributed to speeding. When compared with USA data, KSA has 3.4 times more accidents due to speed as presented in Table 7. One fourth of accidents were due to traffic rule

19 Urban Transport and the Environment 249 violations (e.g., improper turning, overtaking, and stopping). From Table 7, it can be concluded that the percentages of improper-overtaking and disregardedsignal accidents in KSA are about eight times and four times higher respectively than in the USA. Table 7. A comparison for illustration between KSA and USA Item Type of accident Collision with- Other motor vehicles Pedestrian Fixed object Animal Noncollision Cause of accident Speed Disregarded signal Improper turn Improper overtaking * Source: [1]. ** Source: [6]. KSA* 73.7% 9. 5% 7. 1% 0. 9% 7. 5% 41.9% 15.4% 7. 3% 10.7% USA** 73.1% 1.6% 14.7% 3.7% 5.6% 12.2% 15% 4.5% 1.3% As discussed above, speeding and running the red light are the predominant violations among the other violations committed by drivers in KSA. Thus, more analysis regarding these two violations are presented below. The question of interest is: have these violations decreased over the last fifteen years? To answer this question the proportions of each violation for two fiveyear periods (i.e., and ) were statistically compared. Table 6 presents the total number of violations (A?), frequency (x) and proportion (p) related to corresponding violation during each of the two periods. The hypothesis test performed, using the z-test for comparing two proportions, has the following form: Pi ' versus where p. is the proportion of corresponding variable (violation) during the ith 5-year period and z =

20 250 Urban Transport and the Environment The hypothesis tests conclude the following: A significant reduction (at a 0.05 level) in speeding violation was observed between the two periods. That is, a sound improvement in lowering the frequency of this dangerous violation has been achieved (Reject the null hypothesis). No significant difference was found between the proportions of running the red light violation indicating that drivers still disregard the red indication (Accept the null hypothesis). 7 Usage of seat belts As discussed above, the severity index has increased recently as shown from the odds ratio. One effective way to reduce severity during the occurrence of a road accident is by using seat belts. Less than 2% of the drivers involved in accidents in KSA were belted^ compared to 62% and 90% in USA and Canada,^ respectively. Past studies have shown that safety belts reduce the chance of death or serious injury in a crash by almost half. Other studies indicated that in front crashes drivers reported to be using their belts enjoyed an extra margin of protection with air bags.** Driver deaths in frontal crashes were 20 percent lower among belted drivers of passenger cars equipped with air bags than among belted drivers in cars without air bags. That is, air bags are more effective with the use of safety belts. Despite these facts, KSA has no safety belt use laws. Further, no public awareness campaign has been conducted to educate drivers for the importance of wearing seat belts. This lack of seat belt usage needs to be further addressed. 8 Discussion This study has shown that despite the enormous increase in the number of registered vehicles in KSA, fatality rates (per registered vehicle) appear to have declined. Using statistical odds ratio, accident severity has declined over the past 25 years. Despite the overall decreasing trend in both fatality rates and severity, data have shown that this developing country has experienced a worsening situation in safety levels since That is, the fatality rate has increased from 5.5 in 1990 to 7 in Similarly, the severity index represented by the odds ratio has become 1.02 in 1994 compared with 0.92 in Efforts were made in this study to compare the situation of traffic safety in KSA with that of other nations using Smeed's formula. The comparison revealed that KSA stands at a middle position. In spite of its relatively high motorization level, this country has a lower fatality rate than some other countries. The study has also disclosed that drivers are responsible for nearly eighty percent of accidents. About 68% of drivers involved in road accidents during the last five years belonged to the below 40 years age group. The proportion of teenage drivers were found to be three times that of USA. Approximately one-

21 Urban Transport and the Environment 251 fifth of drivers involved in accidents were unlicensed. With respect to accident causes, nearly 60% of accidents were attributed to speeding in excess of the posted speed limit and failure to obey traffic signal indication. 9 Recommendations Based on the previous discussions and findings, recommendations of this study are outlined as follows: In-depth research should be started soon to investigate the current increasing trend in both fatality rates and accident severity. The capabilities of the accident reporting system is a problem in KS A. No detailed information is available in order to carry out deep research. For example, relationship between accident occurrences and road/vehicle factors is obstructed by data limitations. The manual filling system for accident reports creates difficulties in collecting data for analysis purposes. The data collection system should improved and computerization is urgently needed. There should be a special consideration to the problem of illegal driving (driving without a driver's license). Restrictions for unlicensed drivers should be strictly enforced to keep them off the road. Two driver-related-causes of accidents were found to be predominant, namely, exceeding speed limit and the failure to stop at the red light. Strict law enforcement along with educational campaigns must be seriously considered to try to bring the numbers of both violations down. Other countermeasures need to be also considered. The use of safety belts is relatively very low. Using safety belts should be made compulsory. Together with publicity and public information, enforcement should be effective in this matter. There should be a permanent road safety committee to supervise the implementation of any safety programs and to evaluate safety measures and strategies implemented in the future. The committee should also be responsible for directing research activities according to the problem needs and making recommendations for improving the accident reporting system and traffic safety programs. To gain some insight into the size and nature of the road accident problem, KSA can approach the problem more effectively by establishing a research institute (long-run strategy) where in-depth studies on human, vehicular and environmental factors contributing to road accidents can be conducted. This

22 252 Urban Transport and the Environment environmental factors contributing to road accidents can be conducted. This would be a centralized institute to bring together the various interested parties in a common focus point. There is a continuing need for ongoing study and research to identify important patterns and changes in traffic accident trends and recent problems. An annual comparative analysis of accident types may be able to more effectively identify traffic safety concerns that need to be addressed on a short term basis. 10 References 1. The General Directorate of Traffic, Ministry of Interior, Riyadh. The Publications of Road Accident Statistics, for the years Ministry of Communications. Roads and Transportation: Facts and Numbers., Saudi Arabia, Smeed, R. J. Some Statistical Aspects of Safety Research, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (General), Parti, 1949, Smeed, R. J. Variations in the Pattern of Accident Rates in Different Countries and their Causes. Traffic Engineering & Control,, Nov. 1968, A. Bener, A. & Jadaan, K. S. A Perspective on Road Fatalities in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 1992, Vol. 24, No. 2, National Safety Council. Accident Facts, USA, World Tables. 3rd edition, World Bank, Washington, D.C., Asogwa, S. E. The Use of the Police for Limited Road Accident Data Collected in Developing Countries. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 1982, Vol. 14, No. 3, Jacobs, G. D. & Sayer, I. Road Accidents in Developing Countries. Accident Analysis,7, 1983, Vol. 15, No. 5, Mekky, A. Road Traffic Accidents in Rich Developing Countries: The Case of Libya. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 1984, Vol. 16, No.4, Gharaybeh, F. A. Application of Smeed' s Formula to Assess Development of Traffic Safety in Jordan. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 1994, Vol. 26, No. 1, Al-Ghamdi, A. S., Nemeth, Z. & Rogness, R. Forecasting Traffic Accidents in Saudi Arabia by Using a Time Series Model, Presented at the 72nd Annual Meeting oftrb Conference, Washington, D.C., Al-Ghamdi, A. S. "Time Series Forecasts for Traffic Accidents, Injuries and Fatalities in Saudi Arabia." Accepted for publication at the Journal of King Saud University [Engineering Sciences], 1994, Riyadh.

23 Urban Transport and the Environment Al-Ghamdi, A. S. Analysis of Traffic Accidents at Signalized Intersections in Riyadh, pp. 9 to 20, Proceedings of The Fourth Saudi Engineering Conference, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Ergun, G. Condition of Vehicles in Saudi Arabia. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 1987, Vol. 19, No. 5, G. D. Jacobs, G. D. & Cutting, C. A. Further research on accident rates in developing countries. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 1986, Vol. 18, Agresti, A. Categorical Data Analysis, Johns Wiley & Sons, New York, Fleiss, J. L. Statistical Methods for Rates and Proportions, Johns Wiley & Sons, Second Edition, New York, Christensen, R. Log-Linear Modes, Springer-Verlag, New York, Ergun, G. Effects of Driver Characteristics on Accident Involvement: A Study in Saudi Arabia. The Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, King Fahad University, Saudi Arabia, 1984, Vol. 9, No. 4, , 21. Treat, J. R. A Study of Precrash Factors Involved in Traffic Accidents. Highway Safety Research Institute, 1980, No. HSRI 10/11, 6/1, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 22. Lee, K. W. An Analysis of Automobile Accidents in Riyadh. ITE Journal, Feb. 1986, Al-Shiekh, M. A. Analysis of Traffic Injuries and Fatalities in Riyadh: Epidemiological Study, A Student Senior Project, College of Engineering, Kings Saud University, Riyadh, Ministry of National Economy and Finance. Population Statistics. Saudi Arabia, Insurance Institute For Highway Safety (IIHS). Status Report. Vol. 30, No. 3, March, Insurance Institute For Highway Safety (IIHS). Status Report. Vol. 26, No. 5, October, 1992.