European road-safety groups kick off Beirut conference

October 01, 2011 By Marie Dhumieres
The Daily Star

BEIRUT: The European Federation of Road Safety Victims (FEVR) launched a four-day conference on road safety Friday, being held for the first time outside Europe – in a country where people often “compete” to break the law, according to an Interior Ministry official.
Representatives of 18 European road-safety non-governmental organizations attended the opening of the conference, which is entitled “Lebanese European Conference for Road Safety.” It was organized by the Lebanese road safety organization YASA, one of the few non-European members of FEVR. Other Lebanese victims associations, government officials and Miss Lebanon 2011 were also present.
Pointing out that this is the first time FEVR’s annual conference has been held outside of Europe, YASA’s founder Ziad Akl said that victims “have no rights” in Lebanon. He added that he hoped for “positive results” from the conference.
Brigitte Chaudry, FEVR’s former president and representative of a U.K. road safety organization, presented the Brussels Declaration, a list of 33 “recommendations to governments from NGOs advocating for road victims and road safety for the ‘Decade of Action for Road Safety,’” which has been signed by more than 100 road safety organizations worldwide.
The U.N.-sponsored decade project was launched earlier this year and proclaimed the next 10 years as a decade to “stabilize then reduce the forecast level of road traffic fatalities around the world by 2020.”
The list of recommendations in the Brussels Declaration tackles issues from prevention to post-crash response, transportation policies and law enforcement. Chaudry said developing sustainable mobility and promoting safety were top priorities. She noted the lack of public transportation, sidewalks, and other facilities for pedestrians and bicycle riders in Beirut, and urged the Lebanese government “to listen to us.”
Joseph Dwaihy, representing Interior Minister Marwan Charbel, said that although both efforts and progress have been made in the field of road safety, such as implementing speed limits, improving infrastructure and vehicle quality, “traffic accidents still constitute a high death rate and high number of injuries.”
According to Internal Security Force statistics, he said, there were nearly 2,000 road accidents in the first half of 2011, resulting in 231 deaths and more than 2,500 injuries.
He defined the main causes for accidents in Lebanon as speeding, drinking and driving, lack of driver visibility and vehicles in poor condition.
He added that the Lebanese have a serious lack of knowledge of road safety and stressed the need to improve law enforcement, condemning the “weak punishments” for traffic law violations and “a weak system to punish [the illegal selling of] driving licenses.”
“The sad irony is that some drivers compete to violate traffic laws and by doing that, they obstruct the effectiveness of traffic legislations that were mainly implemented for their protection,” Dwaihy said.
Dwaihy presented his ministry’s projects to improve road safety and called for other governmental actors to take action.
Last week Charbel opened the Beirut Traffic Control Center, the latest step in a project to rein in traffic problems in greater Beirut.

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