It was the third day of the holiday and the sun was shining beautifully on the Cairo-Alexandria highway. Dalia's family decided to venture out for a picnic. Dalia, 33, was in the car with her husband, their three children and her husband's 13-year-old cousin. They met her sister's family at a rest house and agreed to meet up again at the zoo on the Cairo-Alexandria highway. “We were all in a very cheerful mood, joking and laughing, unaware that this would be the last time we would talk and the last time I would ever laugh so heartily,” recounted Dalia's sister, Mona, with a deep sigh. The roadway,seemingly full of cheerful picnickers and ordered traffic, was soon paved with a tragedy. Dalia's husband was at the wheel when a truck crossed the highway from the opposite direction. The barriers between the dual carriageways had been removed. In a failed attempt to avoid the truck, the car crashed into the solid barriers and flipped several times before landing on the opposite carriageway. Dalia's husband died instantly. Their nine-year-old daughter, who had earlier been riding in her aunt's car but had pleaded to move to her parents' car only a few minutes before the deadly crash, was also fated for death. Dalia was rushed to a poorly equipped highway emergency unit where she died half an hour later. “The unit was hardly equipped to save lives in such major accidents. It did not even have anesthesia and, of course, no intensive care,” Mona said. “My sister passed away a few minutes after she was rushed there, and her husband's 13-year-old cousin is now suffering from paralysis due to inadequate health care at the time of the accident. The doctors insist that he could have walked again had he had an operation on the spot, but that was definitely not a possibility in Egypt's road emergency units.” Dalia's six-year-old son and a toddler she had weaned only a few months before the accident were the only family survivors of the deadly crash. Both now live with their grandparents. “Dalia's son is suffering from severe depression, my mother has been bedridden since the accident, and the 14-year-old boy, whose father passed away in Syria a few months before the accident and had fled the war to Egypt, is suffering from life-long paralysis,” Mona said. “An entire family has been ruined and the driver of the truck who broke the law and caused the accident fled without punishment.” DEATH TRAPS: Sadly, Dalia and her family members are not the only one whose lives have been ruined on Egypt's roads. The last few months have seen a surge in road accidents, raising both public and official concern. Unofficial reports say that since mid-August last year at least 110 people have lost their lives and more than 120 have been injured in road accidents across the country. One of the deadliest accidents that made the headlines was when at least 17 teenagers lost their lives last November, in one of the most saddening road tragedies to have taken place in Egypt. The teenagers were in a school bus travelling to their school in Damanhour when the bus crashed into a fuel truck and two cars. The bus burst into flames and the dead passengers were burnt beyond recognition. The crash also left 18 others badly injured. Only three days earlier, ten female students were killed and four injured in another fatal accident in Upper Egypt. The deadly crash drew public ire and sparked protests among fellow students. Later in the same month, a bus crashed on the Korimat Road on its way to the city of Minya, leaving four people dead and 18 injured, and a bus carrying 55 workers crashed in an area west of Alexandria, killing one person and injuring 37. In urban areas the picture has been similarly bad, and a number of crashes have shown that no one is safe when driving on Egypt's roads. Rarely enforced traffic laws, poor road planning and reckless driving have turned many of the country's roads into death traps. In the densely populated city of Cairo, where pedestrians and motorists fight for space, accidents between vehicles and pedestrians are commonplace. To survive, drivers and pedestrians must be able to avoiding a car speeding in the opposite direction, sometimes even on a flyover, or crossing carriageways, breaking a traffic light at an intersection, or changing direction suddenly without prior notice. Drivers navigate aroundobstacles and potholes while avoiding pedestrians crossing the road, all the while sending text messages on their mobile phones. Such lack of care and attention explains why people have been waking up to news like that of a school bus flipping over on the 6 October City highway due to excessive speed, killing one student and injuring four others, or of another bus flipping over in the Red Sea governorate of Hurghada, killing four and injuring 47. Reports suggest that road accidents are among the main causes of death in Egypt, and that the country ranks among the highest, if not the highest, for road fatalities in the region. According to a 2012 report by the World Health Organisatin (WHO), Egypt loses about 12,000 lives due to road traffic accidents every year. It also has a road traffic fatality rate of 42 deaths per 100,000 people. “The majority (48 per cent) of those killed are passengers of four-wheelers, though pedestrians also constitute a significant proportion (20 per cent) of the fatalities,” the report said. In November 2014, a joint report from the ministries of the interior and transportation revealed that 100,000 accidents occurred in the period between 2008 and 2012, killing 33,000 people and injuring another 150,000. No fewer than 125,000 cars were destroyed. The annual report by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) also showed a rise in the number of road accidents in 2013 over 2012. Half of the deaths occurred in the 15-29 age group, the report said, with a death rate of 13.3 young people out of every 100,000 of population. Today, the rate has probably risen to 14,000 road deaths per year, or a road fatality every 40 minutes, according to Osama Okail, a professor of planning and transportation at Ain Shams University's Faculty of Engineering and a member of the National Council for Road Safety. WHO has also recently reported that out of the 20 million to 50 million people injured globally on the roads every year, 154,000 are in Egypt. This makes Egypt's roads among the most dangerous in the world. Whereas the global average is four to 20 fatalities per 100 km of roads, Egypt has many times that rate at 131 fatalities per 100 km. And whereas out of every 100 injured on the roads only three die as a global average, 22 out of every 100 injured on Egypt's roads end up in morgues. “The human and emotional toll is high, and so is the economic cost,” said Hartwig Schafer, the Cairo-based World Bank country director for Egypt, Yemen and Djibouti. “It is estimated that the road safety crisis costs Egypt $7 billion, or 3.2 per cent of GDP. Imagine what could be done with $7 billion in a country where 15 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 per day?” Road safety expert Khaled Mustafa concurred. “The high cost of road accidents in Egypt, estimated at perhaps up to LE50 billion a year, makes it necessary for the government to allocate funds to study the reasons behind this high road mortality rate,” said Mustafa. “The government should be transparent about the real causes of the phenomenon.” HUMAN ERROR: Studies by the ministries of the interior and transportation show that heavy trucks accounted for 40 per cent of all accidents in Egypt, followed by private vehicles (33 per cent), microbuses (nine per cent) and buses (seven per cent). Reports by the Interior Ministry's Highways Research Department indicate that human error has been responsible for 76 per cent of all traffic accidents since 2006. Vehicle conditions accounted for just over 20 per cent of accidents, while weather and road conditions claimed about two per cent and one per cent, respectively. A report by CAPMAS also cited the “human element” as the biggest reason behind car accidents, causing over two thirds of all accidents, with the technical condition of cars being a secondary reason. Both government studies failed to name poor road planning, traffic patterns and laxity regarding the enforcement of traffic laws as possible reasons behind the surge in road accidents. “The studies are neither accurate nor professional. They simply tend to lay the blame on road users and truck drivers in order to avoid accountability,” said Mustafa, who has a doctorate on transportation from an American university. “The fact that people die, and not just get injured, on the roads immediately indicates that there is something wrong apart from human error.” Whereas taking a sudden turn, for instance, is human error, Mustafa said it could also result from inadequate road signs or signs posted at an intersection leading a driver to take a belated decision. “Similarly, if a truck driver proves to have been speeding or taking drugs, or a car is broken, that means there is too much laxity in enforcing the law. Liability should be defined in all cases by an independent professional committee and according to international standards to be able to tackle the problem,” Mustafa told the Weekly. A recently published WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety said, “Though there are laws on speeding, blood alcohol concentration, seat-belt wearing and helmet wearing, they are poorly enforced. In addition, there is no adequate provision of infrastructure for non-motorised modes of transport” in Egypt. In his capacity as an international traffic expert, Okail has designed two comprehensive strategies to reduce road accidents and relieve Egypt's traffic congestion. He scoffs at “claims of human error” as no more than “an attempt on the part of the government to avoid responsibility.” “This is due to ignorance,” Okail said. “Ninety-five per cent of road accidents have nothing to do with human error. Putting the blame on the casualties is the easiest way to avoid responsibility and appease public ire.” While driving on the Cairo-Alexandria highway myself in the wee hours of the morning, a small truck overloaded with crates of tomatoes cargo flipped over after one of its tires burst. Okail's comments came to mine. A major, multiple-vehicle crash was avoided at the 11th hour and nobody died in the accident. But the very fact that the highway was full of overloaded trucks proved Okail's point. “Most of the accidents that take place in Egypt are due to serious defects in the patterns of traffic, among them the fact that there are no special roads for trucks,” Okail said. The roads with the highest mortality rates are those having heavy traffic of trucks, many of which are old or loaded beyond safe limits. Trucks account for 50 per cent of all road accidents, and these accidents are often deadly, according to Okail. He said that Egypt is also a country where highways pass through small towns and have villages and rivers on both sides of them, considered a major cause of road accidents. “There are no barriers on the banks of the waterways, and if a vehicle swerves off the road it will plunge into the waterway, killing passengers,” Okail said. “In the meantime, many highways do not have barriers separating the two opposite lanes, contributing to head-on collisions.” The absence of a system to deal with weather conditions like morning fog is another important factor. The fact that many of the spare parts available on the market are defective, with little government control over importing them, and that trucks and buses do not have taco graphs to monitor their condition and speed are other reasons why many accidents are caused by burst tires, loose brakes and speeding, according to Okail. Unlike in the developed world, Egypt does not apply a roadworthiness test to determine that a vehicle is safe to drive on the roads. “Can you spot any human error in what I have said?” asks Okail sarcastically. Speeding, bad lighting and poor road surfaces are all secondary factors that do not necessarily cause accidents, he said, but can make them worse or harder to avoid. Some bus and truck drivers may also take certain drugs in the belief that these will keep them active and awake. “I, for one, do not take drugs, but many of my colleagues do because they think they help them stay awake and make the time pass easily,” one driver told BBC Arabic TV in a report on road accidents. That said, the driver also insisted, “Bad roads are the main reason behind accidents.” “Drivers are not addicts,” Okail said. “But many of them use narcotics to help appease the pain resulting from long, almost round-the-clock driving, their only way to pay off the installments on their vehicles.” HamdyFaheem, a professor of engineering at Minya University, has studied 56 out of a total of 144 black spots where accidents take place on Egypt's roads. The study found that most accidents happened as a result of the overturning of vehicles on bends or head-on collisions, and that defects in the planning of roadways had a “comparatively high contribution to accidents,” beside excessive speed and reckless driving by road users. Egypt needs to spend around $700 million annually on road maintenance. According to the World Bank's Schafer, “Available funds for that task do not exceed $70 million.” That is, the government will only maintain akilometre of the road network every 33 years, he said. “Every dollar spent now on road maintenance will save Egypt $5 in five years,” Schafer added. “Do the math and it is clear that investing in road maintenance should not only be a priority, but is good for the economy as well.” BATTLING THE HYDRA: In a swift reaction to the Damanhour tragedy in November, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi announced amendments to the traffic laws. The amendments were said to be part of a national plan to curb the surge in road accidents. The amendments, recently approved by the cabinet, impose harsher penalties on violations. Those driving under the influence of drugs may face one to two years in prison, depending on the injuries they cause. Those speeding will be receive jail terms, while driving in the wrong direction could be penalised with six months in prison or a minimum three years in jail in cases where a violation leads to death or injury. The plan to curb traffic accidents also includes a special court to oversee traffic law violations and a professional committee to design proposals to minimise road accidents. The amendments include the gradual withdrawal of licences from old cars and restricting the hours for heavy trucks to be on the road from 11pm to 6am. Officials told the Egyptian media that plans are also underway to maintain some 12,000 km of Egypt's overall 24,000 km of highways, extending lanes on some of them, as well as projects for new roads. However, many experts suspect that harsher traffic penalties and quick remedies are piecemeal solutions that will not tackle the root of the problem. It is already the second time in less than six months that the traffic laws have been amended. Previous governments have imposed harsh penalties on traffic violations, and yet traffic accidents are on the increase. “New regulations have done nothing, and all kinds of violations persist on Egypt's roads,” Okail said. Many critics agree that the laws are not properly enforced and are sometimes ill-conceived. They cite an earlier amendment by presidential decree in July that stipulated the removal of trailer attachments to tractor-trailers, as a case in point. The amendment, they say, has hardly curbed the occurrence of accidents, which they insist are mainly caused by defective vehicles and faulty tires and brakes, rather than additional trailers. But Okail's comprehensive strategy for curbing road accidents, recently approved by the National Council for Road Safety and ratified by the cabinet, may provide the right answer to road accidents in Egypt, even if Okail himself remains sceptical. “For the strategy to see the light steps have to be taken on the ground, like having the cabinet allocate a budget and meet with all the bodies concerned to start its application and so on. But nothing of the sort has happened,” he said. But is it still too early to judge? A pessimistic Okail quickly replies in the negative. After all, he says, “another strategy that would have solved Egypt's chronic traffic problems was similarly ratified by the cabinet and a budget was even allocated for it a year ago, but not a single step has been taken since.” Says Okail, “There must be a strong political will to solve the country's traffic problems and curb accidents beyond the media statements. Otherwise, nothing will happen on the ground and blood will continue to be spilt on the asphalt.”
