Road safety attracts government’s concern

TIRANA, March 1 – Hundreds of people die and more are injured in the daily road accidents throughout the country, basically due to breaking driving rules, use of alcohol, bad or lack of traffic signs and bad vehicles.
Such facts pushed the authorities to hold a National Conference on Road Safety to set some more goals to reduce the threatening death number.
All top officials starting with Prime Minister Sali Berisha, followed by the Transport Minister Sokol Olldashi, health Minister Petrit Vasili, deputy Interior Minister Avenir Peka, deputy Education Minister Halit Shamata, deputy Finance Minister Alfred Rushaj and the World Bank representative in the country Camille Naumah took part at the conference.
The premier acknowledged that the number of the road deaths, more than 300 every year, is on average two times higher than in Western Europe.
There have been more than 1,200 injured also.
He said that besides the lack of the proper traffic signals, corruption in awarding driving llicenses is another factor favoring road accidents.
Olldashi said that results showed that 78.8 of the accidents resulted from violating the traffic rules, to be added with 19 percent fault from passerby in crossing the roads and 2.3 percent for technical shortcomings of the vehicles.
Albania has 10 accidents resulting in death for 10,000 vehicles, compared to 5.05 in western countries.
Deputy finance minister also said that the cost of the accidents is 1 percent of the country’s GDP, a high figure for such a poor country.