Harsher penalties next step on Jordan’s path to road safety, say experts

AMMAN — Traffic experts on Tuesday called for the relevant entities to unite efforts to draft long-term strategies to curb road accident fatalities on the Kingdom's roads.

Last week, Director of the Traffic Department Brig. Firas Duwairi said that 220 people have died in road accidents in Jordan since the beginning of this year.

According to Duwairi, 98.8 per cent of traffic accidents are caused by human error.

President of the Jordanian Society for the Prevention of Road Accidents Wafai Mseis said the government needs to “introduce stiffer laws and penalties in the draft Traffic Law”.

“The draft Traffic Law, which was being debated by the Lower House of Parliament, was retracted by the government recently for further study and examination,” Mseis said.

It is of the utmost importance that traffic fines and penalties for motorists are increased if “we want to reduce road fatalities,” Mseis told The Jordan Times.

“People need to pay higher fines and have their licence seized for certain dangerous violations so that they will think twice before committing a traffic violation,” Mseis stressed.

Agreeing with Mseis, former minister of transport and former PSD traffic director Jamil Ali Salim Mujahed told The Jordan Times that the draft law should include a specified one-month period for people to pay fines “so they will be reminded of their traffic violations”.

The current law allows motorists to pay any traffic fines when they renew their driving or vehicle licences, according to Mujahed.

The same applies to the driving licences of the violating motorists, Mujahed added.

“The draft Traffic Law should include certain clauses that would impose heavy punishment that could lead to seizing a driver's licence for months when a dangerous traffic violation is committed,” Mujahed stressed.

Both Mseis and Mujahed stressed the need to establish a higher council for road safety that would include all relevant entities to implement “a long-term road safety strategy in a proper and professional manner”.

Traffic officials pledged recently to beef up road monitoring by increasing the number of traffic patrols and officers patrolling the streets.

The traffic department also vowed to dispatch more secret police along roadways, increase CCTV road surveillance and follow up on social media posts of reported traffic violations.

Recently, the PSD-affiliated  Central Traffic Department (CTD) launched a campaign to raise motorists’ awareness of the importance of wearing a seatbelt.

Last year, Jordan witnessed over 170,000 road accidents, resulting in 562 deaths, according to traffic officials.

In 2021, around 160,000 road accidents occurred on the Kingdom’s roads resulting in 589 deaths.

In addition, 11,241 people were injured, including 737 with serious injuries, as a result of the traffic accidents in 2021.

 Last year, traffic officials announced that the CTD will adopt several measures to curb road accidents including the reinforcement of the Traffic Point System that was published in the Official Gazette in early 2018.