Latvian pedestrians live in danger

  • 2001-06-07
  • Jorgen Johansson
RIGA - Three people died on the evening of June 3 and four were seriously injured in a major car accident involving four vehicles, including a minibus. The accident took place around 8 p.m. on a country road not far from Riga. Two of the cars lay overturned in a ditch by the roadside.

As a rescue team used fire fighting equipment to cut into the wreckage and remove the injured and the dead, police tried to determine the cause of the accident. It soon became clear. One of the people involved, the minibus driver, 34, was under the influence of alcohol.

Every year the turmoil of Latvian traffic claims hundreds of lives, and the question of how to improve the safety of pedestrians is debated with increasing frequency and intensity. Latvia currently tops the list of people killed in road accidents per million inhabitants in Europe.

There were about 260 victims per million inhabitants in Latvia in both 1999 and 2000, three or four times as many as in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Yet Latvia has only 240 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, about half the number of most countries in Western Europe.

Last year, a young man tried to avoid a collision with an oncoming truck by driving his speeding BMW onto the sidewalk. As a result he drove straight through a crowd of people waiting at a bus stop. One eight-year-old girl died from her injuries. This is just one example of a typical traffic accident Latvia faces every day.

Juris Teteris, who heads the driving-test department at the road traffic safety directorate of the Ministry of Transport, said it was difficult to say whether or not Latvian drivers were more dangerous than in other European countries.

"Most accidents are caused by human error," Teteris said. "Attitudes toward safety issues should be much better than they are."

Most pedestrians injured in Riga are hit by cars on crossings without traffic lights. The law states, however, that if a pedestrian shows that he intends to cross the street, or has already started to cross, drivers ought to stop.

Teteris said that there was a problem with Latvian drivers following this law since they lacked the habit of stopping at crossings. Traffic police officers are much too lenient on penalizing drivers for not letting pedestrians cross.

Fines can be anywhere between 5 lats ($8) and 100 lats, depending on how much danger the pedestrian is put in.

Teteris also spoke of difficulties in tracking drivers' records. Later this year, new legislative changes suggest that Latvia introduce a penalty point system similar to that of Great Britain.

In Britain, drivers are penalized for every minor offense. If these points reach a certain level during a set period of time, a driver can face serious prosecution. "These drivers would lose their licenses," Teteris said.

Similarly, Latvian traffic police do not put their foot down on jaywalking, which means that some spectacular attempts to cross roads are often performed in the middle of rush-hour traffic. Another problem, especially at night, is the lack of reflective materials worn by pedestrians.

"People who see a car coming can't imagine that the driver cannot see them," Teteris said.

Riga City Council traffic department Director Ivars Zerumba told The Baltic Times that pedestrian crossings in Latvia must be improved. The paint on many zebra crossings has worn away and become invisible.

But he added: "Attention should not necessarily be paid to improvements in infrastructure, which is quite good already, but rather to other factors contributing to higher pedestrian safety," Zerumba said.

"At the moment, due to limited financing, the main principle is to achieve maximum effect with a minimum of resources."

This minimum has been rising in recent years. In 1997, Riga City Council spent some 8.9 million lats on improving the capital's infrastructure. More than 19 million lats will be allocated in this year's budget.

The rise in money available is no doubt in response to the atrocious road safety statistics.

Last year one person was killed in road accidents every 14.9 hours in Latvia. At the same time one person was injured every 1.6 hours, and a road traffic accident was reported once every 17 minutes. Of the total people killed in road accidents in Latvia last year, 39.6 percent were pedestrians. Eight children younger than 10 years of age lost their lives. More than 50 percent of all road accidents happened in Riga. Every third person killed in a road accident in Latvia was under the influence of alcohol.

For the last six years, Aldis Lama, deputy head of the technology department at the road traffic safety directorate has been putting together statistics on traffic accidents in Latvia. Over those years he said he had noticed only a slight improvement in road safety. Lama said there were many issues that had to be dealt with and mentioned drinking and driving, the need for more traffic lights, that dangerous intersections should be turned into roundabouts and, of course, more funding for the directorate.

"Without money there is nothing we can do to help," Lama said. "Last year, the Latvian government approved a badly needed action plan to improve road safety, but there is a great lack of funding."

Lama also thinks there should be more traffic police officers on the streets to ensure a safer environment for pedestrians.

"We only have a half or a third of the amount of traffic police officers they have in Sweden and Norway," he commented. "Drivers just don't follow traffic rules in Latvia."