More radars on Spanish roads by 2024. “This year we are going to install 88 new ones, 60% of them section.” This is how categorical the General Director of Traffic, Pere Navarro, was in the presentation of the report 'How to save 300 lives a year in Spain' by the Mapfre Foundation and the Spanish Road Association. “The majority will go to secondary roads, which is where we have identified the biggest problem.”
“In Spain, one of the challenges in road safety is on conventional roads: three out of every four fatal road accidents are on these roads, and the same thing happens with motorcycles,” said Navarro.
«The exits from the road are basically on conventional roads, more than half of the fatal accidents as well. If we want to reduce accidents in our country, we have to work in this area,” he stated. The general director of the DGT confirmed that 88 new radars will come into operation this year. “60% are sectional, and only 40% are point, and the majority will go on secondary roads, which is where, at the moment, we have the problem.”
In this way, the head of the DGT recognizes that the biggest accident problem on Spanish roads occurs on conventional roads since “we have been talking for some time about highways, highways, talking, in short, about large high-speed roads. ability. And we get the impression that, somehow, the poor relation, the accident, is on the secondary roads.
Regarding the state of the roads, Navarro considers that the road is not the cause of accidents, but its condition can greatly minimize the consequences. “In that country people would want a highway to get everyone to their town,” he says, but from his point of view this is not really necessary. Thus, other types of measures can be adopted such as 2+1 roads (those that have three lanes: one for each direction of traffic, and another central one, intended for overtaking, which alternates between one direction and the other. circulation; both directions are separated by a physical barrier) or “put two lanes in such a way that you can overtake without having to invade the opposite lane. In short, there are all design and conservation solutions that are being made,” stated the head of the DGT.
With this type of roads, less dispersion of the speed of the vehicles that travel them is achieved, since slower vehicles are allowed to overtake at regular intervals, thereby reducing driver stress and fragmenting queues.
Another problem that the DGT wants to address is the high accident rate of motorcycles and motorcycles. In this sense, Pere Navarrro declared that “we have the profile of the injured person.” The most common accident is on a conventional road, 3 out of every 4 accidents happen on the weekend, and more than half of the accidents occur due to going off the road. «That is, you alone and your circumstances go off the rails. I think the age is between 35 and 54 years old. They are not young people, they are already of a certain age. And it is true that there is a lot of reckless driving especially on weekends. As a novelty, throughout this legislature it wants to implement a novelty that affects the circulation of motorcycles, which will be able to circulate on the shoulder, at a maximum of 30 km/h, as long as traffic is stopped due to a traffic jam.
Regarding controversial measures, such as the elimination of the 20 km margin for overtaking on conventional roads, Navarro acknowledges that their result has not been very important. «I know it was reduced a little. The overtaking margin was news when it came out that we were going to eliminate it. The vast majority of drivers in our country did not know that there was a margin of 20 km per hour to overtake on secondary roads. Therefore, the effect cannot be expected to be exceptional either.
Provisional traffic data
According to 24-hour provisional data from the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT), in 2023, a total of 849 people lost their lives in accidents that took place on conventional roads, 21 more people than in 2022, while, on roads high capacity, highways and highways, deaths decreased compared to the previous year, specifically 296 people lost their lives, 24 less than in 2022.
In general terms, and according to the European Commission, in Spain, between 2019 and 2023 the rate of fatalities in traffic accidents has been reduced by only 1%, far from other countries such as Belgium, which in said period of time has achieved a reduction of 22%, Denmark (20%) and Finland (17%).
According to the DGT, going off the road continues to be the type of accident that records the most loss of life, with 486 people in 2023, which represents 42% of the total provisional fatalities on the road. Regarding head-on collisions, another of the most common accidents, deaths were reduced by 9% last year: 225 in 2023, compared to 246 the previous year.
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