We have come to accept the idiotic saying that rules exist to be broken. Unfortunately, in Ukraine traffic rules and other regulations that both pedestrians and drivers need to follow are broken by dozens of people at the cost of their lives. The result is shocking: this year traffic accidents have claimed 3,700 lives, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Add 32,000 injured people to this figure and you get a horrible picture-even without terrorist attacks.
Experts say that the causes behind this situation need to be considered as one package. Acting Minister Mykhailo Korniienko believes that there are a number of subjective factors that affect road safety. “Violations of traffic rules are the number-one factor. Pedestrians cross the road against a red light. Drivers overtake a whole line of cars at breakneck speed, ignore barriers at railway crossings, or disregard the presence of traffic police. And none of them stop to think that this haste and recklessness may be injurious to themselves and others,” Korniienko says.
“Traffic accidents frequently occur because of drivers’ ignorance of basic traffic rules. Driving schools should be held responsible for this. Every year in Ukraine nearly 3,000 driving schools issue 500,000 driving licenses. But experience shows that 50 percent of these half-baked drivers fail their driving tests the first time, or if they pass, it’s because they paid a bribe. As a result, we have inexperienced drivers with bogus licenses, who are driving on our roads.”
Another cause of traffic accidents is poor road conditions. Oleksandr Holotsvan, managing director of the Ukravtodor State Company, says there is not enough money for high-quality pavement, road signs, and road markings. “But we are doing everything possible to keep roads in proper condition,” argues Holotsvan. “In addition to the technical equipment of roads, we install video cameras along dangerous stretches. We have already done this in the mountain passes of Zakarpattia and Lviv oblasts, as well between the 18th and 33rd kilometer of the Kyiv-Boryspil highway. Video cameras equipped with sensors enable us to monitor the temperature of the pavement and the speed of passing cars.”
Vasyl Zaichenko, the head of the Traffic Safety Center in the State Traffic Police (DAI) of Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, names driver fatigue and bad weather conditions (snow, rain, heat, etc.) as additional causes of accidents. He says that truck drivers are supposed to get at least an hour’s rest after four to seven hours of driving, but these safety measures are rarely followed. Traffic police see a lot of drivers in non-roadworthy cars (with obvious consequences).
Zaichenko adds that “the list of these factors needs to be expanded to include civil engineering work being done on roads, lack of parking signs, chaotic patterns of fixed-route taxis (they stop in places convenient for passengers but in violation of traffic rules), and parking cars outside garages, i.e., in unsafe parking places.”
Everyone seems to be able to pinpoint the causes of traffic accidents, but what’s being done to eliminate them? Korniienko is convinced that an effective plan for enhancing road safety can be achieved only by joining the efforts of the interior, transport, economics, and health ministries, and other national agencies. Such a plan should be adopted as soon as possible because Ukraine needs to host the Euro-2012 championship with dignity. Representatives of these agencies say that are all working on measures aimed at enhancing traffic safety.
Serhii Semenikin, acting head of the State Traffic Police Department at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, suggests setting up video cameras on all important highways in Ukraine and recording how quickly ambulance and emergency crews arrive at the site of a traffic accident. He also proposes recording all violations of traffic rules, toughening technical checkups, and installing tachographs, devices that combine the functions of a clock and a speedometer.
Svitlana Kovalenko, acting head of the Life Safety Department in the Ministry of Education and Science, maintains that we cannot do without a national system of refresher courses for drivers. Although many drivers are reckless and lack a driving culture, they often get away scot-free. According to the DAI, only one in four drivers who violate traffic rules is charged, and out of 5,000,000 infractions logged annually by the DAI a mere 1,000,000 are considered.
Furthermore, drivers often refuse to pay even minimum eight- hryvnia fines. Kovalenko believes that the attestation of educational institutions, particularly driving schools, should include tests of their employees’ knowledge and the development of educational programs for various categories of drivers. To reduce the number of children injured on the roads, she proposes giving children in pre- school institutions and schools a more thorough introduction to traffic rules.
However, officials believe that all these proposals will remain on paper if the necessary financing is not envisaged in the 2008 state budget. They are reminding us once again that Ukraine often has problems with financing socially important projects. This is why we have the oldest vehicle fleet in Europe and the highest fatality rate involving buses.
“The reason behind this phenomenon is simple,” says Liubomyr Krainyk, managing director of the Ukravtoprom State Company. “Ukraine has excessively simplified requirements for converting vans into mini-buses. And we will not move one iota ahead until we raise the tax duty for vans that are brought in to be converted into public transportation vehicles to the level of new cars. Also, when there is a problem, it is very hard to find the guilty party because there is no clear distribution of functions and duties among the various agencies responsible for road safety.”
Each group of problems listed by these experts will soon be defined in a special program being developed by several ministries. So far no one has revealed the exact budget of the program (it is being calculated on the scale of millions of hryvnias). The situation with the timeframe for implementing road reforms is identical. In the next two weeks the chiefs of the DAI and the interior, transport, education, health, and economics ministries, as well as representatives of other structures will meet again, this time to have a focused discussion and adopt concrete decisions regarding this program.
