Motorbikes were the main cause of traffic accidents in HCM City in the first six months of the year, a meeting on traffic safety heard Tuesday afternoon.

The meeting was co-organised by the National Traffic Safety Committee and HCM City’s Traffic Safety Board to discuss efforts to ensure traffic safety in the southern city.

Speaking at the meeting, Nguyen Ngoc Tuong, vice chairman of the Traffic Safety Board, said, of the 1,830 road accidents in the city in the first half of the year, motorbike accidents accounted for 75.5 per cent, while accidents involving trucks and cars were 7.9 per cent and 10.3 per cent respectively.

The number of fatalities was 396, including deaths from road and railway accidents, a 14 per cent increase from the same period last year.

Tuong said the situation was getting worse because the city had held many festivals during the first six months and the use of individual transportation vehicles had risen strongly.

An average of 850 new motorbikes and 180 new cars are registered per day,” he said.

At the meeting, the city’s traffic police proposed increasing the number of surveillance cameras and devices to measure blood and breath alcohol concentration, as well as increasing personnel to handle traffic law violations captured on camera.

Deputy Chairman of the National Traffic Safety Committee Khuat Viet Hng said, to address the problem, HCM City needed to uestablish an inter-sector inspection team to handle traffic accident hotspots.

Raising public awareness of traffic safety was also a pressing issue, he said.

VNS