The police say drivers should be more careful on the roads
• A new monitoring centre has been set up by the Ghana Police Service to check road infractions
• The police want to reduce carnages on the roads through the use of CCTV cameras
• The Centre is called the Motor Traffic and Accident Monitoring and Surveillance Centre
The Ghana Police Service says drivers are becoming increasingly dangerous and recalcitrant.
It is for this reason that the Service has set up a Motor Traffic and Accident Monitoring and Surveillance Centre aimed at ensuring that infractions on the road are identified and curtailed, all in an attempt to reduce road carnages and congestions.
Explaining the purpose of the Centre during a brief event in Accra, the Director General of the MTTD, DCOP Francis Aboagye Nyarko, said that the rising numbers of cases of road carnages, as well as other road infractions, have given reason for such a system to be developed to check users of the roads in the country.
“It is to make sure indiscipline is totally reduced to the berates minimum and to make sure carnages are taken care of. This project has come at an opportune time because of what is happening on our roads currently.
“The project captures the road networks within the country and aimed to help it clear the roads of miscreants who have decided not to comply with the Road Traffic Acts and serving warning to drivers on the roads that this time around, wherever you are know that the Surveillance Center is working and that whatever you do that affects the or goes contrary to the Road Traffic Regulations, you’ll be arrested,” he explained.
Providing further reasons for such a Centre and its timeliness in the country, the MTTD Director of Operations, Superintendent Dr. Sasu Mensah, said that drivers have become increasingly recalcitrant, giving rise for monitoring through the use of CCTV cameras to fish such miscreants out and get the road sanitized.
“This is a surveillance system that has been developed to monitor all traffic infractions and issues regarding careless driving, dangerous driving, driving on the verges of the roads, on our major intersections, on our major highways, towns and cities.
“The reason this system is in place is because of the fact that day in day out, we witness an upsurge of accidents on our major roads and highways and on our major intersections. The crux of the issue has to do with the fact that drivers are becoming increasingly dangerous, increasingly recalcitrant while using our roads. That is why the spate of accidents are increasing, that is why the congestion on our roads are increasing at an alarming pace,” he explained.
Recent figures from the Ghana Police Service show that the Greater Accra region tops the chart of the regional breakdown of accidents, with a total of 3297 number of motor accident cases from January to July this year.
In the breakdown, there were 260 fatal accidents, 876 serious ones, and 2161 minor crashes.
Followed by the Ashanti region, the number of reported cases in the region, within the same period, was 2135, broken down into 298 fatal, 676 serious, and 1161 minor crashes.
