Two Swedish transport specialists will come to Qatar next month to assess the road safety awareness campaign and education programmes in the country, Swedish ambassador Ewa Polano has said.
The announcement was made during a meeting with National Traffic Safety Committee secretary-general Brigadier Mohamed Abdulla al-Malki yesterday, the envoy told reporters yesterday at the embassy.
“In line with the National Traffic Safety Committee recommendations and approval of HE the Prime Minister, two highly qualified experts from Sweden have been selected for this task based on tough international competition,” a statement from the office of Brigadier al-Malki said.
Part of the three-month programme includes developing some guidelines and action plan to be used by various agencies in Qatar during the next five years based on local conditions and international best practice.
The two experts, one in congestion and one on road safety awareness, are well-known internationally and currently implementing a similar project financed by the European Union to assess the migrant drivers, Polano noted.
The Swedish embassy in Doha believes that the ‘Vision Zero’ policy, a proven traffic management safety management system in Sweden, can also achieve positive and substantial results in Qatar.
The experts will assess the road situation in the country and see what could be done to achieve the Vision Zero principle, according to Swedish National Road Consulting AB managing director Jonas Hermanson. He was among the keynote speakers at the recently held Qatar Transport Safety Forum in Doha.
“We could talk about a number fields on road safety like crash data, in depth study of fatal crashes,  analysis of data material, like looking at the driver’s education, driver’s examination, and police enforcement,” he said. “A number of issues are attached to road safety.”
The experts, who are working for the Swedish government, will be travelling back and forth between Sweden and Qatar for three months.
The embassy also invited Minister of Transport and Communications HE Jassim Seif Ahmed al-Sulaiti and Brigadier al-Malki to visit Sweden soon to see how Vision Zero is being implemented.
About the steps that need to be taken to achieve road safety in Qatar, Hermanson said dealing with speed, seatbelts and behaviour of road users should be given importance.
He explained that a deeper understanding on how people react on the road is also needed to change road users’ behaviour, particularly in a country which hosts a multinational population.
“Adding the aspects of having many cultures to deal with makes it more complicated,” he said. “But we all are in traffic so we need to obey the laws and that can be educated and worked on.”