Accident rates continue to rise

It’s not just peo­ple in ve­hi­cles with dri­vers who get dis­tracted or speed who are at risk on the roads; other groups like pedes­tri­ans, trac­tor dri­vers and bik­ers are too. Sta­tis­tics on traf­fic ac­ci­dents from last year re­veal that a large num­ber of fa­tal­i­ties in­volve peo­ple get­ting run over, pedes­tri­ans, agri­cul­tural ve­hi­cle dri­vers, mo­tor­cy­clists and their pas­sen­gers. 185 is the fig­ure given for road deaths in 2018. This fig­ure was bol­stered by the 21 fa­tal­i­ties re­sult­ing from peo­ple get­ting run over, as well as the deaths of six trac­tor dri­vers and 35 bik­ers. How­ever, the fig­ures do not re­flect the total num­ber of deaths on the roads be­cause deaths ini­tially thought to have been caused by con­ven­tional ac­ci­dents that later turn out to be the re­sult of crim­i­nal or sui­ci­dal acts are not in­cluded in the total, so the total num­ber of deaths is over 185.

Traf­fic au­thor­i­ties are con­cerned about the in­crease in the num­ber of deaths caused by peo­ple get­ting run over and about mo­tor­cy­clists’ high ac­ci­dent rates. (The cases in which pedes­tri­ans were run over on mo­tor­ways in­volved peo­ple walk­ing at the side of the road and peo­ple who left their cars after hav­ing an ac­ci­dent or a me­chan­i­cal issue.) Traf­fic au­thor­i­ties are par­tic­u­larly con­cerned about mo­tor­cy­clists be­cause of their vul­ner­a­bil­ity and high fa­tal­ity rates.

The biggest issue, ac­cord­ing to traf­fic au­thor­i­ties, is ex­ces­sive speed and dis­trac­tions caused by the use of tech­nol­ogy (such as mo­bile phones) in­side ve­hi­cles. The Di­rec­torate Gen­eral for Traf­fic (DGT in Cata­lan) has in­tro­duced new laws ac­cord­ingly. From today, for ex­am­ple, dri­ving at over 90 km per hour on two-lane roads is banned, and this year a new law to in­crease the penalty for the use of mo­bile phones while dri­ving should be com­ing in.