On average, 25 drivers cross the red signal or commit other traffic violations every hour in Kuwait, shows a report from the Ministry of Interior’s Traffic department. Despite stringent penalties and punitive measures introduced by the traffic department, more than 600 such serious violations are recorded each day in Kuwait.
Since the beginning of the year until the end of August, the Traffic Planning and Research Department at the General Traffic Department recorded around 145,000 traffic violations including the crossing of red traffic lights. Of these violations, more than a quarter, or nearly 38,000 red light crossings were registered against women drivers.
While majority of the traffic violations were indirect, there were 20,000 cases where the drivers deliberately jumped the traffic light. The majority of these wilful offenders were men, who accounted for 18,000 of the total deliberate red-light crossings, with women accounting for the remaining 2,000.
Of the 125,000 indirect violations, 79,000 were attributed to male drivers, 36,000 to female drivers and 10,000 to company vehicles. The data also shows that a total of KD7.3 million was collected as traffic fines during the first eight months of the year, the majority of it for jumping the red traffic light.
A small ray of hope in the middle of this bleak traffic statistics is that the number of traffic violations have dropped from the 300,000 violations in 2017 to 273,000 in 2018. If the average figures for the first eight months of the year holds true for the rest of the year, then 2019 could turn out to be the first time in years that traffic violations have not exceeded the quarter-million mark.
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