Road accident deaths in five months to August 22 saw a 1.7% rise compared to the corresponding period last year, according to statistics released by the Iranian Legal Medicine Organization—the coroner’s office.
During the period, 7,062 people lost their lives in car crashes, 5,522 were men and the rest women.
Southern Province of Fars topped the list of Iranian provinces in terms of the number of fatalities with 629 people, followed by Khorasan Razavi with 494, Tasnim reported.
Ilam, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad and South Khorasan provinces had the least fatalities respectively with 56, 83, and 93.
The data categorizes deaths as per the type of roads, according to which inter-city roads suffered the highest road fatalities (4,720), followed by urban areas with 1,820 deaths. The least number of road accidents resulting in death were in paths in rural areas (518).
A total of 158,759 people were injured on the roads during the same period, up by 7.4% year-on-year—113,508 men and 45,251 women.
The pattern of road accident rates in some provinces indicates that provincial roads, especially in Fars, Khorasan Razavi and Tehran, are not safe for driving.
According to the World Health Organization’s 2014 report on road safety, Iran has the highest number of deaths caused by road accidents in the world. The report suggested that 43.5 people out of every 100,000 are killed in road accidents in Iran.
Every 19 minutes, one person dies on Iran’s roads and every two minutes people will hear that one of their family members has survived a crash but with serious injury and perhaps lifelong disability. WHO has not updated the number for Iran since.
According to Iranian Traffic Police, sleep-deprivation (fatigue), speeding, overtaking from the wrong side, running a red light, talking on the cell phone, text messaging and munching behind the wheel are the most serious driving violations leading to crashes.
With regard to road safety, in 2017 Iran was ranked 189th among 190 countries globally, according to the Central Insurance company of Iran Research Center. The only country ranked lower is Sierra Leone.
The other reason for the unacceptably high death toll is the poor quality of vehicles produced by local carmakers.
According to Iran Standard and Quality Inspection Company, a private body that conducts quality and safety tests on behalf of the Ministry of Industries, from 37 domestically-made vehicles, hardly three received one star out of five and 11 models score down below with two stars.
