National roads threaten traffic safety

Over half of road accidents in Vietnam occurred on national roads, a recently released report by the Transport Strategy Institute has shown.

Accidents on provincial roads account for 26 per cent and city roads claim 23 per cent.

The report concluded that more efforts should be made to improve traffic safety on national roads.

Vietnam\'s national roads, a network of roads and a few expressways that link all the major population centres in the country, remained inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality, said Dr Pham Huy Khang, Dean of the Highways and Airdrome Department at the Hanoi-based University of Transport. 

Only 43 per cent of national roads were of a good standard, according to the report, and more than one fifth were "bad or very bad".

The length of national roads is also low, at 0.050km per square km and 0.2km per 1,000 people. The figures were "small compared to regional countries", said the report.

According to another traffic safety assessment that covered 3,800km of Vietnam\'s national roads in 2009, only 8 per cent of them were "perfectly safe" for cars and 6 per cent for motorbikes. 

A total of 13,700 road accidents with more than 11,000 deaths were reported in Vietnam last year, according to the National Traffic Safety Committee.

The number of accidents and casualties reduced by 2.4 and 0.4 per cent respectively in the first two months of this year in comparison to the same period in 2010.