Traffic campaign to monitor school buses launched

AMMAN — With the beginning of the new scholastic year, the Traffic Department has launched a comprehensive traffic campaign to combat traffic accidents of school buses and ensure the safety of all students, according to an official source.

The move comes following a school bus accident earlier this week, where 10 students, one teacher and a driver were injured in Abu Alia in Amman, Lt. Yazan Moumani reported, adding that they were transferred to Prince Hamzah Hospital where they were listed in fair condition. 

The new Traffic Department campaign will target school buses to check up on their maintenance and ensure their compliance with the public safety standards, including the ban of extra load, sudden stops and parking in unsafe pickup and drop off zones, according to a Traffic Department statement sent to The Jordan Times on Wednesday.

The campaign will also include intensifying the monitoring of traffic violations that may hinder the students’ movements, mainly the wrong parking in front of schools’ gates.

The department personnel also visited several schools in cooperation with the Education Ministry to raise road safety awareness among students, in addition to distributing awareness brochures and leaflets to the drivers, the statement read.

While the campaign received praise on social media from several citizens who described it as “much needed and on time”, others said that it is good, “but not enough”.

Several people stressed that the checkup process should not only be applied to the buses, but also to the drivers who bear the greatest responsibility of the students’ safety.

“There should be a list of regulations for the employment of bus drivers whereby there is a particular age range and they undergo a training and medical checkup before starting the work,” Abu Ziad, a user on Facebook commented.

Mamoun Khatabteh, another citizen, suggested registering all the buses and drivers information on a unified online system to facilitate their monitoring, adding that all the vehicles should have a tracking system that records the speed to fine violators.

According to the Public Security Department's (PSD) latest traffic report, every 50.3 minutes a traffic accident occurs, whereby every 32.4 minutes someone is injured and every 12.8 hours someone dies as a result of car accidents.

The PSD report showed that there were 150,226 total road accidents in 2017, resulting in 685 deaths and 16,246 injuries, including 1,495 severe cases.