77 people killed in traffic accidents in Iran in three days
According to the head of the traffic police, 77 people have lost their lives in traffic accidents in Iran in the past 72 hours. Sardar Hadianfar says that 40 percent of road accidents in the last days of the year were vehicle rollovers.
On Thursday afternoon, March 21, during a visit to the Nowruz headquarters of the Alborz Provincial Traffic Police on the Tehran-Karaj-Qazvin Freeway, Brigadier General Kamal Hadianfar explained the statistics of traffic accidents on Iranian roads over the past three days.
According to the state-run IRNA news agency, the head of the traffic police says that 77 people have been killed and about 1,700 injured in traffic accidents in the past 72 hours.
It is predicted that the number of out-of-town trips during Nowruz this year will increase by more than 10 percent compared to the same period last year. Accordingly, the possibility of an increase in traffic accidents during the holidays at the beginning of 2019 cannot be ruled out.
Hadianfar said about these accidents: "According to statistics, 40 percent of the accidents that occurred on the country's roads over the past 72 hours were vehicle rollovers, and more than 20 percent were due to drivers losing control of the vehicle, and the rest were due to other issues."
Thousands of accident-prone spots on Iranian roads
In road accidents, three factors - human, road and vehicle - play the main role. The substandard nature of most domestically produced vehicles is an issue that officials also criticize. Sardar Taghi Mehri, head of the National Police Traffic Police (NAJA), also said in July last year that there are still about 5,400 accident-prone spots on Iranian roads, 3,400 of which are on suburban roads.
However, according to official statistics from responsible institutions in Iran, nearly 70 percent of accidents occur due to human error and failure to pay attention to the road ahead, turning left, and exceeding the permitted speed limit.
Although the number of traffic accident victims in Iran is still very high compared to many countries in the world, this situation has "improved" greatly in the past decade.
The head of the Naja traffic police says that in 2005, more than 28,000 people were victims of traffic accidents in Iran, and this figure decreased to 16,200 in 2017, despite the increase in the number of cars.
The ups and downs in the declining number of victims
The number of road accident fatalities last year has not yet been officially published, and the trend in the number of fatal accidents is experiencing ups and downs. In May of last year, the Young Journalists Club News Agency reported, citing forensic statistics, that the number of traffic accident victims in 2017 had increased by 1.7 percent compared to the previous year.
The number of traffic accident victims in Iran varies in different seasons of the year and days of the week. A review of available statistics shows that the number of 77 deaths in the three days leading up to the start of the new year was less than the average number of victims in the past two years. Accordingly, the number of traffic accident victims during this period was less than 26 people per day.
In 2017, an average of 44 people died in traffic accidents per day. Statistics from the Forensic Medicine Organization on the number of fatalities in such accidents in the first eight months of last year indicate a slight increase in the average number of deaths per day during this period. During this period, the number of road accident victims was recorded at 12,261.
Source: DW
