Things We Learned From Songkran Accident Statistics

[Mudcrab]

@Mudcrab

Blah Blah Blah

not having a license plate?

Not having a drivers license?

Ban motorbikes?

How about considering that a license plate doesn'' cause an accident.

A drivers license doesn't prove anything about your ability to drive. When was then last time you were tested...I mean really tested...did a defensive driving course?

Ban motorbikes? Spare me. the kids who ride around the village are just like I was many years ago when I rode, unlicensed, unregistered and underage in the back blocks of Western Australia.

We learnt how to ride motorbikes and learned how it hurt when you fell off. It made us more aware and I humbly submit better prepared to life o the bitumen. To suggest banning motorbikes is plain silly. I would bet that the most likely cause of the deaths on motorbikes during Songkran is due to motorbikes hitting cars (or cars hitting motorbikes). Part of this could be due to city drivers doing their once a year outing out of Bangkok to the homeland with the city driving attitude. Ban the cars!!!

Also remember that apparently there are an extra 1 million new cars on the road this year. The road toll should have increased proportionally...but it didn't so it seems.

[annabel]

To sum up ... all the money spent on campaigns is a huge waste of money

Unless the campaigns specify what was previously quoted and seriously mean it =

1. Using a vehicle without a licence - jail.

2. Riding without a helmet - instant loss of licence.

3. Drunk driving - jail.

All vehicles impounded for 1, 3. and sold off

Substantial fines - may help.... no Must help is useless ... MUST BE ENFORCED ...

[supashot]

here is what we learned:

[HerbalEd]

A large contributing factor seems to have been overlooked here. The fact that there were many, many more cars on the road, and a lot of those were traveling much further than normal ... thus there's bound to be proportionately more accidents.

[hyperdimension]

There has been plenty of debate regarding the accuracy of the statistics for traffic related deaths in Thailand (lets try not to go off topic and rehash that debate).

According to http://www.thaiwebsites.com/caraccidents.asp the were 8093 traffic related deaths in 2010, 8305 deaths in 2011 and 7784 deaths in 2012.

Thats an average of 22 deaths per day.

The Songkran figures are: 320 deaths over 7 days: An Average of 45 per day.

Thus twice as many people are killed in road traffic accidents over songkran than the yearly average.

However, there are probably twice as many cars on the road.

So, is there really any change at all due to Songkran? Could the cause in statistics be simply due to an increase in traffic and nothing more?

This again suggest that the issue is not Songkran drunks, speeding and helmet-less riders, but driving standards and road safety culture on a whole throughout the year.

Thailand only reports those dead at the scene and according to the WHO those figures are around 12,000 fatalities.

Other countries calculate the road toll by including those that die up to 30 days after an accident.

Based on the report World health organization Global status report on road safety 2013, the reported number of road traffic deaths per year in Thailand (adjusted for 30-day definition of a road traffic death) is 13,365, which is 37 per day.

The WHO's own estimate using statistical regression is 26,312, which is 72 per day.

Here is some information from the report about WHO's regression model:

The regression model produced estimates of total road traffic deaths according to the accepted ICD definition, which counts all deaths that follow from a road traffic crash, regardless of the time period in which they occur (unlike many official police/transport road traffic surveillance databases, where road traffic death data is based on a definition of 30-days following a road traffic crash).

So we have 3 different values for the number of road traffic deaths per year in Thailand:

• on-the-spot: around 8000
• within 30 days of the accident: 13,365
• any time after the accident and caused by the accident: 26,312

If the death statistics that we read in the media here are only on-the-spot deaths, then it would be more realistic to at least triple the stated value.