Analyzing Saudi Arabia’s Driving Licenses, Traffic Accidents and Casualties
In 2017, it was estimated that a car accident happens every minute on average in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the estimation was considered an improvement when compared to earlier years.
Thankfully, the Saudi general authority for statistics has published both data sets for anyone to have a look. Since i had access to these data, lets explore the them to gain insight on how recent incidents and developments affected car traffic accidents and casualties.
After taking ages to clean the data, i managed to compare each region’s number of accident from 2016 till 2018. From the bar plot above, The greatest region has to be the Eastern Region as it managed to constantly reduce the number of accidents by a significant rate over the years. However, Madinah is one of the regions that raise a flag as the number of accidents seems to steadily increase, what on earth could cause this ?.
After searching online, it appears that two factors that can significantly contribute the the increase of the annual number of accident is Hajj and sandstorms. During haj, domestic pilgrims drive towards Makkah which causes a congestion and an increases the possibility of an accident. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia constantly gets visits by sandstorms, which increases the chances of accidents as it reduces visibility as in the article below.
From the above plot, Makkah had an increase in accidents in 2017 from 2016 which makes sense as it is the hub for pilgrims to gather during Hajj, there is a high chance of increase in car accidents as it gets extremely crowded during that period. However, the reduction of the number of accidents in 2018 can also be explained as the haramain Express in Makkah was optimized to operate on a higher speed by the end of 2017 as seen in the article below.
In 2017, a study by the Riyadh-based King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC) stated that Saher cameras reduced the annual number of deaths by more than 37% as seen in the article below.
To confirm this, i plotted the figure above which shows the number of deaths from car accidents in 2016 till 2018. I reduction in annual death counts can be observed in all regions except Jizan. After exploring the web for an answer, the only reason i could find is highway accidents due to sandstorms as cited above. I believe further data is needed for a better insight for this region.
From there, i went to explore the license dataset which contains the annual number of licenses issued per each region. I believe the number of license is more valuable than region population as it filters out the group who do not drive.
In the scatter plot above, the more the region goes further above the diagonal line, the more license it issued in 2017 compared to 2016 and the more the region goes further below the diagonal line, the less license it issued in 2017 compared to 2016. We can observe that Riyadh issued significantly more licenses in 2017 compared to 2016 while Hail had the highest rate of reduction in license issuance in 2017 compared to 2016.
The plot above shows a normalized scale of 1 accident to licenses issued ratio. The taller the bar, it means there are more licenses issued than the number of accidents in that region. For example, Riyadh had a ratio of 5 licenses issued per 1 accident occurrence.
In Conclusion, the reduction in annual traffic accidents and casualties could be linked to recent developments in the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia. However, more data is needed to interpret deviant regions.
