Concern Over High Road Fatalities in Iran

Poor roads, substandard automobiles plus reckless driving are pushing up road fatalities, says a Traffic Police deputy chief.
Ayoub Soleimani pointed to the rising rate of road fatalities and called for “effective measures to help protect the thousands of innocent lives lost to road accidents every year,” the news website Asre Khodro reported.
Charts from the Iranian Legal Medicine Organization show indicate that during the first half of the current fiscal year to September, over 8,800 road deaths were recorded, which is 1.7% higher than the corresponding period last year when 8,600 people lost their lives.  
The LMO has published detailed reports on road fatalities over the past 13 years. According to the published data, in the fiscal ending in March 2005, more than 28,000 people died in road accidents. The number dropped to 15,900 in the Iranian year that ended in March 2016.
However, the number of road fatalities has been of the ascending order since March 2016.  Road accidents claimed 16,201 lives in the last Iranian year that ended in March -- 1.9% higher than a year earlier.