A key reason for the road crashes is the increasing number of motor vehicles, especially motorcycles, catering to the rapid growth in the resource-rich region, the experts from the Asian Developmnent Bank (ADB) and the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
Losses caused by road deaths and injuries as well as damage to vehicles were inhibiting economic and social development and worsening poverty in Southeast Asia.
"Road crashes impose costs on countries of around two percent of their annual gross domestic product (GDP) and, on this basis, the cost to the ASEAN countries is estimated at over $11 billion annually," said Charles Melhuish, a transport specialist with the Manila-based ADB.
"The situation will likely deteriorate even further unless urgent and effective action is taken to help" member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) "make its roads safer," he warned.
ASEAN comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam,
Melhuish said road accidents in the region caused "recurring economic losses" which "undoubtedly inhibited economic and social development."
Statistics show that road crashes in ASEAN disproportionately harm low-income groups because pedestrians and bicycle- and motorcycle-riders are the "most frequent casualties," Melhuish said.
"When a household head is killed or disabled, poverty is significantly perpetuated or even increased."
According to the ADB, although governments in the ASEAN region had developed action plans on road safety, their recommendations "had in general gone unimplemented" due to ineffective coordination mechanisms and inadequate budgets and technical resources, among other reasons.
Following a request by ASEAN, the ADB has approved a technical assistance grant of $500,000 to identify obstacles to road safety faced by each country and devise a regional strategy to tackle the problem, bank official said.
The ADB estimates that in 2000, ASEAN states suffered 72,800 traffic accident deaths and over 1.8 million injuries, many serious or resulting in permanent disability.
But the statistics belie the true picture in the region, analysts say.
In Thailand alone, 12,936 people were killed and more than two million people suffered road injuries in 2001, 80 percent of them motorcycle riders or passengers not wearing crash helmets, according to the country’s health ministry.
Precise figures on road accidents are difficult to come by because many cases go unreported, said Ian Scott, a technical officer in injury prevention at the Manila-based WHO Western Pacific office.
According to the WHO, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia have the world’s worst road safety records. It also warns that road crashes will jump from the ninth to third most important health problem by 2020.
Scott said that mechanisms adopted in developed nations, some of which have slashed the rate of deaths and injuries from road accidents by half-to-two-thirds, are not "immediately transferable" to developing nations.
He cited the increasing use of child restraints in cars in the developed world which has drastically cut down the road accident casualty rate there.
"But if you wave the magic wand and have child restraints in, for example, every car in Vietnam, you will still not be able to drastically cut the injury or death rate of children because only five percent of that country’s motorized vehicle fleet are cars," Scott said.
There is a very proportion of two or three wheeled motorcycles in ASEAN’s vehicle fleet. Some 95 percent of vehicles in Vietnam are motorcycles. – AFP