By Florence Afriyie Mensah
Fumesua (Ash), July 31 GNA – The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) is in the process of restructuring to digitise its systems and deploy technologies to regulate the road safety space.
The move is to align the operations of the Authority with the national policy of digitizing the entire economy, while employing appropriate technologies to reduce road crashes in the country.
Mr David Osafo Adonteng, the Acting Director-General of the Authority, who stated this noted that modern and digitised systems in road safety, which were being employed across the world, had helped to significantly reduce road crashes, deaths and injuries.
He spoke to the Ghana News Agency in an interview at Fumesua in the Ejisu Municipality, saying the Authority was working with key stakeholders to achieve its objectives.
He said as part of the process, all transport operators would be registered and given standards to operate on, and these would be monitored electronically through the deployment of technologies at various terminals and also track the movement of vehicles.
Mr Adonteng said the Authority would fix tracking devices on vehicles to help monitor in real time as the cars traverse the roads to various destinations.
“This means that, we will monitor what they do at the terminals, we will monitor as they leave the terminals and hit the road then to their destination on a 24-hour surveillance,” he explained.
Mr Adonteng said all activities that were found to violate the traffic laws would be brought to the attention for resolution.
The Acting Director-General said issues of over-speeding, wrongful overtaking and drinking while driving, which were critical components and contributory factors to road carnages on the roads would be addressed.
The deployment of the technologies could take absolute control of these operational mechanisms within the road management chain and ultimately reduce incidence, risks and all that contributed to road crashes and deaths.
Touching on the road performance, Mr Adonteng, said interventions were impacting positively, which caused significant reductions in crashes, injuries and deaths.
In the past 18 months, road fatalities have reduced to about 16.19 per cent while crashes have come down to 10 per cent and injuries to 2.5 per cent, however, although there were still high records of crashes on the roads, the “reduction trend clearly motivates and encourages you to do more,” he said.
“Here, we have identified the areas where we need to strengthen our efforts and I must say that I have seen a recommitment from my team coming from the regions,” Mr Adonteng said.
He said the Authority would do more to see to a major reduction because it was still recording high figures of crashes.
GNA