222 people died in road accidents in January alone
Road carnage claimed 222 lives in January 2020 alone. This is according to provisional data on road accidents from the Motor Transport and Traffic Directorate (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service for the 16 regions.
The statistics also show an average of seven deaths daily for the first month of 2020, from accidents mainly attributed to reckless driving.
The deaths represent a 10% increase compared to the same period last year, which recorded 201 deaths.
There has also been a rise in crashes as reflected in the total reported accident cases of 1,191 in January 2020, as against 1,036 in January 2019.
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The country is not only losing its human capital to accident-related deaths, but productive lives are being rendered disabled due to serious injuries. As many as 1,396 injuries were registered in January 2019, surpassing the previous year’s 862 by 60%.
From the data, persons significantly affected were productive males aged above 18.
The Central Region leads the pack with 48 deaths in 58 crashes, followed by the Ashanti Region with 38 deaths in 275 recorded case.
The North East Region recorded no fatalities under the period of review.
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The total number of vehicles involved is also up from 1,664 to 1,998.
The only metric which showed a declining trend is that the 60 persons were killed out of a total of 218 knockdowns in 2020, whereas 66 died out of 273 knockdowns in 2019.
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Even though private vehicles were the most involved in accidents (853), 44 deaths and 294 injuries were were recorded in accidents involving private vehicles, lower than accidents involving commercial vehicles (717), which resulted in 99 deaths and 750 injuries.
Commercial vehicles captured under the report comprise of buses, minibus, truck, taxi, and others. On the other hand, private vehicles include minibus, saloon cars, SUV/4×4, truck and government cars. Motorcycles have a subset which contains motorized cycles, bicycles, hand cart (trolley) and tricycle.
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The number of motorcycles recorded in crashes was the lowest among the vehicles (428), yet there were 79 deaths and 352 injuries in accidents involving motor bikes, outstripping those of private vehicles.
Deaths from pedestrian knockdowns slumped to 60 out of a total of 218 accidents in January 2020. At the same period in 2019, There were 66 deaths from 273 knockdowns.
The most fatal of the accidents occurred fourteen days into the New Year when 34 Ghanaians died after a head-on collision between two buses at Dompoase in the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) Municipality of the Central Region. A baby was killed in the accident on the Cape-Coast Elmina highway. A 10-year-old girl survived that accident but her parents didn’t.
Another accident was recorded on January 15 in which a commercial vehicle collided with a tipper truck, killing one person in the process while injuring 10 others at Abrepo Junction in the Ashanti Region.
A total of 2,284 lives were lost in 2019 based on provisional data compiled by the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD). In all 13,877 crashes were recorded involving 22,789 vehicles.