STREET EPIDEMIC
Road kill left behind by the fast and the furious
By Dong delos Reyes, Contributing Editor
The bus driver just turned rabid. He made sure she was dead-it was at first homicide through reckless imprudence, the bus bumping at the elderly woman cradling cake in a carton box as she was crossing on foot a section of Regalado Avenue in Fairview, Quezon City. The box flew off her hands. So did she, landed barely alive, moaning, witnesses recounted. The driver backed up, ran her down before fleeing with the multiton bludgeon of a vehicle. Icing, gristle, and gore made a few splotches on the killing ground. That was in 2005 when out-of-court settlement for homicide-turned-instant-murder cases like that meant coughing up less than PhP20,000 per fatality. And in this case, the goner was Lina Monroy. She served as section editor for the nationally circulated daily, Malaya.
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In that same year, police blotters tacked up 714 fatal road accidents, Monroy's death included, as a tick of statistics-but unreported cases could notch up the harvest of deadly traffic mishaps to 8,180. Road-traffic accidents-fatal, serious injuries, minor injuries, and damage included-totaled 973,240 in the year Lina Monroy was killed. Those accidents ate up about US$1.9 billion in cost to life, limb, and damaged property, or about 2.6 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
Road-safety journals point out that most of those killed or injured are pedestrians, most of them happen to be family breadwinners. Thus, road mishaps somehow aggravate poverty in the country.
Aside from breadwinners, around 96,000 Filipino children are maimed or killed each year due to road-related accidents, according to records of the Asian Development Bank and the National Center for Traffic Safety. Like their elders that were maimed or murdered on the road, these children were also pedestrians when they met with accidents.
In a survey on injuries brought to the emergency rooms of three hospitals in the cities of Parañaque, Pasay, and Olongapo, it was found that road-traffic-related injuries are the leading cause of injuries among children 14 years old and below-three of every 10 cases. Mauling or assault toted 28 percent; falls, 20 percent; and lacerations, 14 percent. Most of these road accidents involved bicycles, and to a lesser extent tricycles and motorcycles.
Viewed from a global perspective, road-traffic-related injuries are now deemed as an epidemic. Every three minutes a child is killed, while 20 to 30 million more are injured or disabled on the world's roads. Road deaths in poorer countries are set to rise by 80 percent by 2020, and unless drastic measures are taken to curb this trend in the next three decades, road-traffic injuries will become the eighth-leading cause of death.
Conservative estimates peg the cost of the new epidemic worldwide at US$518 billion.
Says Peter Adamson, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) adviser: "Without being alarmist you can see that there will be millions of young people killed on the roads in the years ahead. There is so much that could be done by developing countries at their current stage of development and it could prevent so much misery and suffering. It would be outrageous if it were allowed to continue in the years ahead."
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization observes that teenage drivers have more than five times the risk of a fatal crash compared with drivers 30 years and above.
The WHO also notes that in many countries "a high proportion of injured pedestrians who have taken alcohol fall in the 16 to 19 age group."
So what's killing these youngsters who have taken to hitting the road as part of their hip lifestyle?
Speed is the culprit, according to the WHO. Findings can bear that out, say, reducing speed by a kilometer per hour has been shown to lead to a four- to five-percent decrease in fatal accidents. On the other hand, research shows that a five-percent increase in average speed leads to approximately a 10-percent increase in all injury crashes and a 20-percent increase in fatal crashes.
Young people and motorbikes have become a lethal combination on the road-and are unsafe at any speed, warns the WHO in its Report on Youth and Road Safety released to coincide with the observance of the First United Nations Global Road Safety Week on April 23 to 29.
"Young motorcyclists make up a significant percentage of injuries and fatalities among road users in many Asian countries, including Cambodia and Malaysia. Factors such as speed, no helmets and risk-taking behavior, and drunk driving contribute to the rise in fatalities," the WHO cites.
In high-income nations, most of those killed or maimed in road accidents are drivers of four-wheeled vehicles. But in low- and medium-income countries, "vulnerable road users" which include pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, and passengers of public transport make up a larger bulk of those injured or killed.
The WHO notes that most motorcycle deaths are a result of head injuries. Wearing a helmet correctly can cut the risk of death by about 40 percent and the risk of severe injury by 72 percent. However, many countries do not strictly enforce laws covering the use of helmets.
The UN health agency asserts that simple measures can be taken to make young people safer on the roads. Such measures include:
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Setting and enforcing appropriate speed limits;
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Setting and enforcing blood alcohol limits;
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Introduction and enforcement of mandatory seat belt, helmet and child
restraint laws;
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Provision of safer routs for pedestrians and cyclists; construction of speed
bumps, separating different types of traffic; and
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Improvement in emergency services from the crash scene to the health
facility and beyond.
Making the roads safer for both pedestrians and motors entail exercise of political will and financial investment-at least 10 percent of development budgets for roads provided by the World Bank and other major lenders should be channeled to road safety, the WHO concludes. M
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