Aim is for zero deaths in traffic accidents: PM Yıldırım

ANKARA

Turkey aims to reduce the number of deaths from traffic accidents to zero, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said, stating that within the last 15 years, the government has reduced accidents involving death by 30 percent.

“In terms of traffic safety, we find where we stand to be unsatisfactory,” Yıldırım said on Nov. 16.

“The target is zero accidents involving death. Some countries have achieved that but we have a long way ahead of us,” he said.

“In 2003, the number of people who died at the scene of an accident was 4,000. This number is the same today, despite the fact that the number of vehicles have increased by 130 percent and the number of journeys have increased by three times to around 2,000,000. The number of accidents involving death have almost stayed the same. That on its own means saving approximately 8,000 lives,” he said.

Yıldırım said that human error in accidents cannot be tackled easily by government policies. However, with education, the number can be reduced.

“The solution is education. Education is the way to decrease human error and even reduce it to zero,” he added.

The Education Ministry should focus on including classes on traffic safety in the national curriculum, Yıldırım also said, adding that the traffic section of the Interior Ministry would also be strengthened.

“In Turkey, the burden of traffic has been increasing along with the number of passengers. Technology has developed and road standards have been raised, so it is necessary to revise structuring accordingly,” he said.