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28 March 2024

RTA targets school and college students

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By Staff

Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has kickstarted its awareness plan for 2011 by launching two traffic awareness quizzes targeted at school and college students in Dubai, the agency said in a media statement on Monday.

The first targets about 12,282 college students and the second targets the students of all public and private schools in Dubai.

The agency will adopt new techniques in communicating with the categories targeted by the traffic awareness programmes, particularly the youth in universities and school students, said Maitha bin Udai, CEO, RTA Traffic and Roads Agency.

“Through these quizzes, we focus on specific topics guided by the statistics and data of traffic accidents as well as the findings of studies focusing on the underlying factors of accidents. The traffic studies revealed the first and foremost factor responsible for traffic accidents in the first 10 months of 2010 was the lack of maintaining sufficient distance between vehicles,” she said.

Lack of sufficient safety distance caused about 373 accidents in the period, resulting in 14 fatalities, 19 serious injuries and 303 moderate and light injuries, she said.

“Statistics also showed that drivers in the age bracket 18-25 years triggered 465 traffic accidents in the first 10 months of last year; 19 per cent of which were attributed to the lack of leaving a sufficient safety distance,” maitha elaborated.

“The Traffic and Roads Agency has set up a quiz for college students titled 'Your distance is your safety’ to stress to the young drivers and alert them on the risks of failing to leave a sufficient safety distance. The quiz calls for producing a film not exceeding five minutes about the safe driving distance between vehicles and its impact on the traffic safety, and the RTA will be offering valuable prizes for winners sponsored by Sharaf DG,” she said.

“The launch of this Quiz in the first week of January 2011 was preceded by a series of preparatory procedures taken since last October by the Traffic Awareness Team overseeing the Quiz, which visited several colleges under the ‘Traffic Awareness Ambassadors’ carried out by the Traffic Awareness Section at the agency where the objectives, systems and procedures of participation in the quiz was explained to university students in Dubai.”

The overall concept of the quiz is to educate students and capitalise on their efforts in transmitting the awareness messages across a wide range of associates of the participant in the quiz which will run through the mid of this year. The number of awareness messages to be delivered is expected to be in the order of 6,000 individuals every month.