Mr. Baroud, please stop the killing

Almost two weeks ago, two young men were driving down from Faraya very early in the morning. For some reason, perhaps speed, perhaps the water on the road after a night of rain, or some combination of both, their vehicle swerved off the road near Feytroun and exploded, killing both.

The incident, one of the countless fatal car accidents that occur in Lebanon on average daily, again brought home the astonishing absence of a national traffic policy. One can of course blame reckless drivers, but a larger share of the blame goes to the state, in particular the police, which has systematically failed to implement its own traffic laws.

When the interior minister, Ziad Baroud, came into office, for a time the police began imposing penalties on drivers not wearing a seat belt or caught speaking on their mobile phones while driving. Like everything else in the land, though, the effort was haphazard, having little impact. More important, little was done to curtail speeding, a greater danger that could easily be brought under control if the police showed some will.

In the past year or more we’ve all noticed the bright new cars and four-wheel-drive vehicles given to the Internal Security Forces. The cars are from the United States, have thick wheels, and are very much designed to appear aggressive and run fast. They have the horsepower to engage in high-speed car chases, to ram other cars if need be, and presumably to make a Lebanese policeman feel as powerful as an American one.

Thank heavens the Lebanese have shown little incentive to go along with that image. But it’s also disconcerting to see the vehicles, otherwise, serving mainly one purpose: to allow policemen to cruise slowly through Lebanese streets, inert with boredom, while doing absolutely nothing to implement traffic laws. In fact, on most days it is the policemen themselves who seem to break those laws in one way or another.

It cannot be difficult to impose speeding regulations. The favorite technique of the police has been to set up speed guns on highways to catch drivers exceeding the speed limit, then to set up a road block further on to hand out fines. But you can only use that method ever so often. Roadblocks only strangulate traffic, increasing the burden on all drivers. That’s why the roadblock system is used sparingly in most countries.

What should be done is to deploy police cars on Lebanon’s main highways and thoroughfares, and demand that they do their job by signaling to speeding drivers that they need to stop. No one asks that the police chase all the crazier drivers, as the results will be cataclysmic; but if enough police cars are present on a highway, one car can signal to another ahead that so-and-so is coming his way. In other words, the effective way to limit speeding is for the police to be present, to coordinate the efforts of its cars on the road, to set up an efficient network of observation, to impose high fines for speeders, and to do so at most hours of the day and night.

Before long, the mere presence of the police will make people slow down. A system of cameras can also be set up to catch speeding cars that the police don’t see. This is all very basic policy, which begs the question: Why, on most days, are Lebanese drivers forced to take their lives into their own hands by driving on major highways? Why is it that, specifically on the matter of imposing speeding regulations, the police has been thoroughly incompetent, in fact dangerously nonexistent?

There is no convincing explanation. And yet Lebanon is well known to be accident prone. An article published on this website last September cited a 2004 study by Sweroad, the consultancy arm of the Swedish Road Administration, to the effect that Lebanon had “more than twice as many deaths per 100,000 vehicles than in Western European countries.”

The author, Matt Nash, also cited Internal Security Forces figures that 2,767 accidents occurred in 2006, killing 378 people; 4,421 in 2007, killing 497; and 2,483 accidents up to August 2008, killing 275 people. However, he found that these figures were substantially lower than those provided by the Lebanese Red Cross, “whose statistics show a total of 8,115 accidents in 2006, 9,546 in 2007 and 4,661 up to June 2008.”

According to a report published seven years ago by the Youth Association for Social Awareness (YASA), which addresses Lebanon’s traffic policies and their shortcomings, “Lebanon [is] almost the unique country in the region, where traffic laws are outdated and not well implemented. Unlike Lebanon, most [Middle East and North Africa] countries have amended and improved their traffic rules and laws during the last decade.”

No one seriously doubts Ziad Baroud’s competence. When several prisoners escaped from Roumieh Prison earlier this summer, he intervened to fire security officials for being asleep on the job. But the traffic situation, which he promised to address when he was appointed, is becoming a blight on his record. The cars are there, the police are there, and the road network in Lebanon is not especially vast to prevent effective policing. There is no reason to allow the barbarity on the roads to continue, nor the daily readiness of some to commit homicide or suicide.