OVER a third of this year’s road fatalities are made up of tourists or foreign workers, police said yesterday.
The alarming statistic has prompted authorities to discuss ways on how to reduce this figure, including creating more awareness among foreign nationals on the island’s Highway Code.
“A large number of foreigners – both tourists and workers – forget that we drive on the left side of the road here and veer into the opposite lane,” Traffic police chief Doros Achilleos told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
“We need to raise more awareness among foreigners to learn the driving system in Cyprus. Because they don’t know the system and get confused they then drive on the opposite side of the road. This is the main cause of accidents.”
Achilleos said even foreign workers from third countries who were forced to pass a local driving test before being allowed to drive in Cyprus often veered into the wrong lane.
“It’s not just Europeans who drive on the other side of the road that forget we drive on the left. It’s the foreign workers as well and this causes accidents and fatalities,” he said.
Achilleos said police had from last year started distributed pamphlets translated into different languages informing tourists of Cyprus’ road safety regulations, including what side of the street people drove on. The pamphlets were prepared in co-operation with the Cyprus Tourism Organisation and were distributed at airports, ports, hotels and car rental companies, he said.
Despite Cyprus’ commitment to keep in line with European Commission goals by slashing the island’s road deaths in half by 2010, road deaths are so far up 15 per cent from last year.
Following the death at the weekend of two foreigners – one Indian and one Briton – the number of fatalities for 2007 stands at 54, 21 of whom are foreigners, according to police statistics.
Two more people were seriously injured in the Nicosia and Limassol districts during the early hours of yesterday morning. A seven-year-old boy is also in critical condition after he was knocked down in Larnaca on Sunday, police said.
“This is something that concerns us and we must thoroughly investigate the cause of accidents because only then can we deal with the phenomenon,” Justice Minister Sophoclis Sophocleous said.
Following the island’s EU accession more tourists and third country nationals had started to come to Cyprus, he said.
“Here we drive on the left. Other than the UK, where they also drive on the left, most countries drive on the right hand side of the road so we have to keep reminding them to keep to the left,” Sophocleous said.
The minister said the issue had been brought up for discussion at the Road Safety Council, which was considering dotting the island’s roads with ‘Keep Left’ signposts.
“We also need to consider bicycle lanes, because there are a large number of people who now use bicycles in Cyprus as their only means of transport as it is more economical,” he said. Nevertheless these people had to learn to have better lighting when using their bicycles so that they could be more easily seen by other motorists, he added.
“By the end of the month the Road Safety Council will have a series of proposals prepared to try and reduce the number of fatalities,” Sophocleous said.
Achilleos also believed foreigners’ lives were at risk due to the lack of bicycle paths and bicycle lanes.
“We don’t have any in Cyprus,” he said. “Because of this bicyclists drive in the roads. This is very dangerous because they’re cycling alongside motor vehicles and risk being hit because of the high speeds at which the other vehicles travel.”
According to news reports, police are also going to examine whether foreigners killed in accidents are using old vehicles that are less safe, and whether enough awareness has been created regarding the dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol and not wearing a seatbelt.
Achilleos said: “Although we’ve had an increase in road deaths we’ve had an overall decrease in accidents by 17 per cent. The number of serious injuries is down as is the number of slight injuries. This shows that our campaigns to reduce accidents are effective.”
The traffic police chief pointed out that it was a fine line between a serious accident and a fatal accident.
“It is a substantial fact that accidents in all categories have gone down. Nevertheless, due to unfortunate circumstances a number of them have led to road deaths,” he said.
