VIJAYAWADA: Around 82 per cent of fatalities due to road accidents reported in the State last year were due to overspeeding, according to the data released by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.
A total of 24,475 road accidents were reported in the State in 2018, in which 7,556 persons were killed and 23,456 suffered injuries. As many as 17,440 mishaps were due to rash driving and overspeeding, killing 6,196 persons; 1,345 were killed for driving vehicle under the influence of alcohol, 740 for wrong side driving, 48 for signal jumping and 82 for cell phone driving. However, the total number fatalities fell by 6.3 per cent as compared to 2017.
Despite the Transport Department taking a slew of initiatives, including identification and repairing of black spots on national highways, installation of caution boards on accident prone areas and imposing penalties for driving at more than the permissible speed limits, the number accidents being reported and fatalities due to them have been crossing the 24,000 and 7,000 marks every year since 2014.
In Visakhapatnam, a city with more than a million population, 1,838 and 1,667 road mishaps were reported in 2018 and 2017, respectively. In Vijayawada, 1,657 and 1,648 accidents were reported in 2018 and 2017, respectively. However, when it came to the fatalities, Vijayawada surpassed the steel city and registered 359 deaths in 2018 and 349 in 2017 in comparison to Vizag’s 311 (2018) and 343 (2017) figures.
As per the rankings, Visakhapatnam was placed at 18th position in 2018, followed by Vijayawada, for most number of accident-related deaths across the country. As per the data, Andhra Pradesh slipped by one rank and placed at eighth position for the same category.