Roads in Ghana should be “forgiving” to save lives – BRRI

The Building and Road Research Institute (BRRI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) wants to be challenged by government and other road agencies to solve problems in Ghana's road environment.

The Institute particularly wants to play a lead role in the country's road safety and traffic engineering projects, in the national collective drive to curtail carnage on major highways.

Road traffic crashes are said to be a result of multiple factors in the complex interplay between the man, the vehicle and the road: when one of these is not functioning properly, accidents occur.

The BRRI say it is high time Ghana centered its road safety activities on the philosophy of improving the road environment and not merely attempting to change human behavior.

Chief Research Scientists and Deputy Director, Francis Afukaar has been speaking to Luv Fm on the role of the Institute to providing scientific-based solutions to road safety problems.

He observed that road safety campaigns carried out in the form of educational and sensitization programmes are not yielding the expected results because “we are solving the symptoms and not the real problem”, stating that it's very difficult to change the human being.

“You can build very good roads and if the human beings who are using it don't seem to understand how best these roads function, this could lead to crash. If even the human being is expert; he knows driving; he knows traffic but the vehicle is not responding appropriately, it will result in crash” he said.

The onus, he noted, is on people who build and manage roads to ensure the system tolerates mistakes of motorists, and therefore should design the system on the basis of human failure.

“Road safety is a young science and so if people want to continue business as usual; they want to build roads the way in the past they've been building, I'm afraid in this contemporary times, it won't be possible because of the high speed nature of vehicles”, said transportation engineer.

According to him, roads should be “forgiving”, that is constructed in such a way that even if a motorist makes a mistake, he will not crash or lose his life – road traffic improvement demands simplifying decisions for drivers and other road users through dualization of most of the country's major roads.

“For instance, on a dual-carriage way, there is a unidirectional flow of vehicles. By this if any driver would like to overtake, you don't need an opposing lane, a lane for an on-coming vehicle. You only pass another vehicle on a different lane in one direction and so it simplifies decisions for motorists”.

He says current trends of major fatal crashes involve head-on collision but believes provision of dual-carriage ways could solve the problem, emphasizing that “it could be expensive but it is more expensive losing the human resource base through fatal crashes”.

Mr. Afukaar however decried the marginal inputs of the BRRI in national road safety management, saying the value of the Institute in road construction delivery is not appreciated, inspite of capacity to conduct safety auditing to standardized projects.

“There have been a number of proposals but in a situation where you don't get any proper feedback because they think you're government subvented organization and they don't want to deal directly with you, it becomes so painful; painful in that here we have a database for road traffic crashes and we do a lot of studies in these things to see what exactly is bringing out these things” he wailed.

Mr. Afukaar is challenging government to engage the BRRI in contract research for the country to benefit from their expertise in road engineering and safety.

Story by Kofi Adu Domfeh/Luv Fm/Ghana