Causes and effects of road traffic accidents in Jimma town

Abstract

Ethiopia has the highest rate of RTAs, owing to the fact that road transport is the major transportation system in the country. The Ethiopian traffic control system archives data on various aspects of the traffic system, such as traffic volume, concentration, population density and vehicle accidents. With more vehicles and traffic, the main towns like Addis Ababa, Jimma, Bahirdar and so on takes the lion‟s share of the risk, for example in Addis Ababa with an average of 20 accidents being recorded every day and in Jimma town with average of 4.4% accidents being recorded every month. The research was based on the collected data from Traffic Police Office in year 2010/11 to year 2014/15. The data from the questionnaire survey and field observations has been carried out to realize the data performed from traffic police, which was used as complement to the traffic accidents analysis for the purpose of this research work. A statistical analysis serve as tables, figures and excels were utilized to describe the relationship between dependent variables and independent variables. The research analysis indicated that the number of road traffic accidents occurring on the roads around the market and residential areas were very high within a range of 50-60 % of the total. The highly occurred traffic accidents in this area due to pedestrian‟s lack of awareness about the severity of the accidents, failure to give priority to pedestrians, inaccessibility of pedestrians cross road, inaccessibility of pedestrians walkway, the absence of traffic signs on the road or lack of road facilities, poor traffic management etc. In this research out of the road users, pedestrians were the most affected parties by the road traffic accidents. Then the average causality of pedestrians was about 56 % of the road users. Passengers and drivers were frequently involved in the accidents. The most sever in road traffic were males particularly whose age group under 18 to 50 years old who have a great role in any activity of economic development. This indicated us the country becomes with aged people who were not active in economic development. All safety measures introduced to protect the road users are disregarded by the large number of drivers, pedestrians, school children ; and that the majority of them have a tendency in complete ignorance of the dangers encountered by traffic accidents. The study recommend that road safety improvement on the road like pedestrians walkway, pedestrians cross road, traffic signs, channelizing of the road at intersection, and educating all the road users must be practiced. That means better traffic accommodation with planning, education, administration data capturing, regulation, enforcement and making capital investments in a new transport facilities.