Amid rising death tolls on Cambodia’s roads and proposed legislation requiring all motorcycle passengers to wear helmets, tuk-tuk and motorcycle-taxi drivers on Monday were treated to a free helmet at a workshop in Phnom Penh.
Though most of the carnage on Cambodia’s roads is caused by speeding SUVs and drunk drivers, about 600 vehicle owners from across the city attended the World Health Organization-sponsored seminar.
The lessons drilled them on everything right down to the very basics of helmet use, such as selecting the right size and correctly fastening the chin-strap.
“Many drivers don’t know how to wear the helmet properly. When we ask them to demonstrate, they keep putting the chin-strap under their jaw instead of on their chin,” said Kimvong Pea, a road safety specialist at the Ministry of Public Works and Transport.
“After the presentation, we had hundreds of drivers who can now use their helmet properly, and this will make the roads safer.”
Last year, 1,966 people died and a further 5,349 were injured on Cambodia’s roads, with almost 68 percent of those being motorcycle drivers or passengers, according to the Transport Ministry, which also found that motorcycle drivers and passengers wore helmets just 65 percent and 9 percent of the time, respectively.
But Ear Chariya, Road Safety Program manager for Handicap International, said that rather than helmet-use, speeding and drunk driving were the major problems on the country’s roads.
“Our research shows that the main cause of the accidents on the road is speeding and drunk-driving,” Mr. Chariya said.
“The focus on helmet use might reduce head injuries but it is not going to reduce the number of crashes.”
He added: “I cannot find any road safety initiatives to make an intervention on speeding. And there is almost zero police enforcement.”
He also said that some drivers may have attended the event just for the free helmet.
Sok Chhunoeng, vice president of the Independent Democracy of Informal Economy Association, which represents more than 4,000 workers in the informal transportation sector, said that his members would have liked to have been able to ask questions at the event.
“There have been proposals to change many laws that will affect the livelihoods of our members—helmet laws, insurance laws and laws about limiting passengers—and we have many questions to ask,” he said.
