Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: The number of traffic accidents in Oman dropped by 71.6 percent during the past five years.
From 4,721 mishaps in 2016 (1 accident every 2 hours), it declined to 1,341 in 2020 (1 accident every 6 hours), according to data from the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI).
Also, statistics indicated that due to these accidents, 1,365 were injured and 371 died. Omanis comprised 75 percent of the number of injuries and 64 percent of deaths caused by traffic accidents in 2020.
According to the statistics, 39.4 percent of traffic accidents were caused by collision between vehicles. As for accident causes, over-speeding topped the list as the major cause of accidents by 702 incidents, comprising 52.3 percent of 2020’s traffic accidents.
Reckless driving led to 226 accidents while negligence caused 206 cases. Another reason that caused 88 accidents was not keeping a safe distance between vehicles. Forty accidents took place due to vehicle defects, and 30 more were caused by wrong overtaking and 49 accidents were caused by other reasons.
The number of registered vehicles in Oman reached 1,560,000 by the end of 2020 comprising a 1 percent increase from 2019. Of those vehicles, 78.4 percent were private vehicles.
Omanis made up 86 percent of the total number of private vehicle owners. On the other hand, private vehicle owners (20-50 years old) comprised 93 percent.
