Nepal needs to invest an estimated extra $879 million in road safety over the next decade to halve its road crash fatalities, according to a new World Bank report.
Released today at the Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm, the report ‘Road Safety in South Asia: Opportunities for Shared Regional Initiatives’ points to the high death rate on the roads in the eastern subregion – which comprises Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal – caused by chronic lack of investment in systemic, targeted, and sustained road safety programmes and identifies relevant investment priorities to reverse the trend.
In Nepal, road crash deaths and injuries have been on a sharp upward trajectory since the early 2000s with a fatality rate of 8.59 per 100,000 population in fiscal year 2017-2018 as per official reports.
“Years of rapid economic growth in South Asia, followed by a steep rise in vehicle ownership have led to mounting traffic deaths and contributed to lost economic opportunities,” said World Bank vice president for South Asia Hartwig Schafer. “South Asia’s road safety crisis is unacceptable but preventable,” he said, adding that the good news is that South Asian countries recognise the urgent need to protect their people, save lives, and sustain their journey toward greater prosperity. “We at the World Bank stand ready to support their efforts.”
While urgent national-level actions in countries across the eastern subregion, which accounts for the bulk of South Asia’s population, vehicles, and road crash fatalities, remain a top priority, the report also calls for regional initiatives to make roads and vehicles safer.
The report emphasises the need to focus on regional trade corridors where crashes are significant, and roads are unsafe. All categories of road users and vehicle types – animals, pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, motorcycles, motorized three-wheelers, cars, minibuses, buses, mini trucks, trucks, and agricultural vehicles – are represented in these corridors with narrow lanes, limited or no shoulders, and inadequate pedestrian facilities.
The road safety conditions on these regional corridors mirror the nature and scale of conditions prevalent on national highways. Crash data collected in a sample of highway sections across Nepal, India, and Bangladesh reveal alarming annual fatality rates ranging from 0.3 to 3 fatalities per kilometer, at a yearly average of 0.87 fatalities per kilometer.
To better monitor the effectiveness of road safety efforts, the report recommends a shared regional initiative to harmonize crash data management and analysis systems across South Asia. Currently, South Asian countries are in varying stages of developing crash data and performance management systems that analyse the underlying factors behind each crash; whether it was defective road infrastructure, faulty vehicle design or human error.
The report suggests South Asian countries could join the proposed regional road safety observatory for Asia and the Pacific to complement these efforts and to facilitate more rapid and effective knowledge transfer.
“Historically, when countries reached motorisation levels of between 50–100 vehicles per 1,000 people, road crashes became one of the leading causes of death and injuries,” lead transport specialist at the World Bank Arnab Bandyopadhyay said, adding that improving road safety was then recognised as a national development priority. “This holds important road safety lessons for the South Asia region where the rate of vehicle ownership has doubled over the past decade and remains on an upward trajectory.”
The report's proposed regional initiatives will go a long way in helping countries improve road safety, he added.
Released today at the Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm, the report ‘Road Safety in South Asia: Opportunities for Shared Regional Initiatives’ points to the high death rate on the roads in the eastern subregion – which comprises Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal – caused by chronic lack of investment in systemic, targeted, and sustained road safety programmes and identifies relevant investment priorities to reverse the trend.
In Nepal, road crash deaths and injuries have been on a sharp upward trajectory since the early 2000s with a fatality rate of 8.59 per 100,000 population in fiscal year 2017-2018 as per official reports.
“Years of rapid economic growth in South Asia, followed by a steep rise in vehicle ownership have led to mounting traffic deaths and contributed to lost economic opportunities,” said World Bank vice president for South Asia Hartwig Schafer. “South Asia’s road safety crisis is unacceptable but preventable,” he said, adding that the good news is that South Asian countries recognise the urgent need to protect their people, save lives, and sustain their journey toward greater prosperity. “We at the World Bank stand ready to support their efforts.”
While urgent national-level actions in countries across the eastern subregion, which accounts for the bulk of South Asia’s population, vehicles, and road crash fatalities, remain a top priority, the report also calls for regional initiatives to make roads and vehicles safer.
The report emphasises the need to focus on regional trade corridors where crashes are significant, and roads are unsafe. All categories of road users and vehicle types – animals, pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, motorcycles, motorized three-wheelers, cars, minibuses, buses, mini trucks, trucks, and agricultural vehicles – are represented in these corridors with narrow lanes, limited or no shoulders, and inadequate pedestrian facilities.
The road safety conditions on these regional corridors mirror the nature and scale of conditions prevalent on national highways. Crash data collected in a sample of highway sections across Nepal, India, and Bangladesh reveal alarming annual fatality rates ranging from 0.3 to 3 fatalities per kilometer, at a yearly average of 0.87 fatalities per kilometer.
To better monitor the effectiveness of road safety efforts, the report recommends a shared regional initiative to harmonize crash data management and analysis systems across South Asia. Currently, South Asian countries are in varying stages of developing crash data and performance management systems that analyse the underlying factors behind each crash; whether it was defective road infrastructure, faulty vehicle design or human error.
The report suggests South Asian countries could join the proposed regional road safety observatory for Asia and the Pacific to complement these efforts and to facilitate more rapid and effective knowledge transfer.
“Historically, when countries reached motorisation levels of between 50–100 vehicles per 1,000 people, road crashes became one of the leading causes of death and injuries,” lead transport specialist at the World Bank Arnab Bandyopadhyay said, adding that improving road safety was then recognised as a national development priority. “This holds important road safety lessons for the South Asia region where the rate of vehicle ownership has doubled over the past decade and remains on an upward trajectory.”
The report's proposed regional initiatives will go a long way in helping countries improve road safety, he added.
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