According to statistics, traffic accidents claim about 350 lives and tens of thousands of injuries every year.
This is an unbelievable number, behind which are painful families and transparent victims whose names you hardly know.
The conclusion is simple and tragic.
Without public pressure, at least another 127 people who are still unaware of their fate and tens of thousands more injured may be added to the 223 killed so far this year.
Unfortunately, if the measure is social networks, then the country's leaders hardly deal with the issue on a regular basis, but only during a difficult week like the last one that passed us by.
A 37-year-old Hora resident was killed in a car accident on Route 80 // Photo: MDA
The main element of the national failure is the lack of a national plan to combat road accidents.
It seems that the ills of our leadership are reflected in the traffic accidents, the lack of governance, the lack of planning and the reaction without initiative.
Our leadership only acts following public pressure on issues that clearly need to be addressed regardless.
For years the risk factors for serious and fatal accidents have been known to all parties.
Some of them are not taken care of due to the financial interests of those in power, and in the rest of the cases it is simply a lack of hands, since there is no guiding hand.
In three government ministries - the Ministry of Transportation and Road Safety, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Security - there is no comprehensive agency on the issue of road accidents.
It seems that the Israeli governments threw up their hands without trying anything.
The scene of the accident in Petah Tikva, photo: Ami Shoman
The traffic division of the police, whose personnel are dedicated, professional and committed to this fight by virtue of their daily presence at the scenes of carnage, has been greatly weakened in recent years, and we see the results in the lack of presence on the intercity roads.
Here are some key data on road accidents from 2021:
Buses are involved in 8% of the fatal accidents, 50% of which injure pedestrians.
Trucks make 19% of fatal accidents.
And despite these shocking figures, in the State of Israel there is no digital tachograph that records and transmits in real time the driving and stopping data of the vehicle, to a control center of the vehicle owner or to a database.
As of this year, Arab drivers are involved in 49% of all fatal accidents in Israel.
84% of these accidents are the fault of the driver.
This is about 100 deaths every year.
Pedestrians are killed in 30% of fatal accidents, 35% of them at crosswalks.
The hitting vehicle at the scene of the accident, photo: Ami Shoman
About 400,000 electric tools were involved in 5% of fatal accidents from 2010 to 2020.
This is a huge market of purchase and "upgrade".
I will end with the words of Yaniv Mooded, who in December 2021 in a fatal accident lost his two children Tov-Rai (3) and Hilli (6), and a fetus carried by his wife Hodia, who died four months after being injured.
"I had a lovely family and in one moment everything turned upside down, the children were killed, including the unborn child, and my wife still hasn't woken up. How much we should appreciate the simple and small things that seem so routine to us."
Retired NCP Ilan Mor is the former traffic police chief
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