Letters | Why traffic collisions in Hong Kong should be ringing alarm bells
- Transport Department’s failure to take into account no-injury collisions ignores a treasure trove of road safety data. It’s time to set up an independent road safety centre
Hong Kong should establish an independent Centre for Road Safety to ensure that all available data is used in designing and maintaining safer roads. This should include accidents data generated from near misses and no-injury collisions, the latter type officially known as “traffic accident damage only”.
Such accidents data is an excellent indicator of where road design is poor, which roads are susceptible to poor driving and whether areas of driver attitude need to be enhanced. But this essential road safety information is ignored in the Transport Department’s road safety strategy.
Many near-miss traffic collisions are uploaded on social media, while tens of thousands of no-injury collisions are reported to the police each year. However, this data on no-injury collisions, while meticulously maintained by the police, appears to be just as meticulously ignored by the Transport Department.
After the considerable time and effort spent by the police in investigating and collating information relating to these collisions, this data is not used by the Transport Department when designing roads, deciding speed limits, safety equipment or even when positioning static enforcement equipment.
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