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The Vietnam News

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Vietnam looks to cut traffic accidents

Traffic experts unanimously agreed to launch a new nationwide campaign against traffic accidents at a conference Friday. The new campaign, including more traffic patrols and heavier fines for violators, will be launched Wednesday.

Experts from the Ministries of Transport and of Public Security attended the meeting in which the ministry reported that in the first six months of this year, Vietnam’s 7,670 traffic accidents killed 6,910 people, 464 more deaths than the first half of 2006. An additional 5,920 people have been injured so far this year. Though these statistics include water and rail accidents, road incidents make up nearly 96 percent of the totals. Officials at the conference attributed the accident hike to an increase in vehicle purchases, the lack of traffic police, a rise in industrial sites requiring heavy traffic on roads lacking infrastructure, and an alarming number of unlicensed buses that tend to overload and drive carelessly.

In the southern Binh Thuan province where the conference was held, there are currently only 80 traffic policemen. Meanwhile, vice director of Quang Ngai provincial police in central Vietnam lieutenant-colonel Nguyen Thanh Trang said that most traffic accidents in his province were due to the thousands of trucks traveling to and from the giant Dung Quoc Economic Zone. Deputy minister of transport Nguyen Hong Truong told experts not to blame infrastructure and instead look towards keeping dangerous drivers off the road. “Statistics show that the flatter the road, the more serious the accidents,” he said. “It is unacceptable that one driver can cause 2-3 accidents in a year and can continue to drive.”

At another traffic-focused conference a week earlier, minister of transport Ho Nghia Dung had said that nearly 52,000 cars and over 1.53 million motorbikes were registered in the first six months of the year, a year-on-year increase of 10.3 percent and 15.7 percent respectively.

By Que Ha - Thanh Nien - July 29, 2007.