Engineer advocates for increased funding to meet safety goals

By Rathindra Kuruwita

The number of deaths in road accidents in Sri Lanka has been decreasing since 2020, Kamala Gunawardena, a highway consultant with over 20 years of experience and consultant to the World Bank on road safety, says.

Sri Lankan police categorised accidents into four groups; fatal, grievous, non-grievous, and damage only, she said.According to the annual summary of road accidents, compiled by the National Council for Road Safety there were 3,003 deaths due to road accidents in 2016, 3,101 in 2017, 3,097 in 2018, 3,097 in 2019, 2,829 in 2020, 2,513 in 2021, 2,515 in 2022 and 2,280 in 2023.

Road accidents that fall under the ‘fatal accidents’ category, too, had dropped, Gunawardena, who is an engineer by profession, said. There were 2,824 accidents classified as fatal in 2016. There were 2,924 such accidents in 2017, 2,949 in 2018, 2,641 in 2019, 2,242 in 2020, 2,414 in 2021, 2,395 in 2022, and 2,171 in 2023.

“Even in the ‘damage only’ category, there were 13,675 such road accidents in 2016, in 2020 there were only 5,807 and in 2023 there were 5,903 such accidents,” she added.

Gunawardena said motor cyclists and pedestrians were most likely to be killed in road accidents. In 2019, 776 pedestrians died from road accidents. The number was 671 in 2020, 612 in 2021, 792 in 2022 and 702 in 2023 according to the statistics from the National Council for Road Safety. 1,162 motor cyclists were killed from road accidents in 2019, she said. The numbers were 1,021 in 2020, 1,124 in 2021, 820 in 2022 and 702 in 2023.

“When it comes to drivers, 282 were killed in 2019, 200 in 2020, 298 in 2021, 189 in 2022 and 168 in 2023. Meanwhile 405 passengers were killed due to road accidents in 2019, 279 in 2020, 264 in 2021, 314 in 2022 and 249 in 2023.”

Gunawardena said even Sri Lanka had an average of 38,000 crashes annually and there were around 3,000 fatalities and about 8,000 serious injuries.

She added that Sri Lanka needed an additional investment of about two billion US dollars to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 3.6 target of a 50 percent reduction in national road crash fatalities.

Gunawardena said Sri Lanka had many ‘black spots’ on its roads, i.e., a location with a high concentration of accidents compared with other similar sections on the road system.

“If we go into more detail, these are stretches of about 500 metres in length, on which either five or 10 fatal road accidents have taken place in the last three years,” she said.