The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has debunked reports in the media that the Accra-Cape Coast highway is the deadliest highway in Africa.
It said available national data on road traffic crashes updated since 1991 did not mirror the Accra-Cape Coast Road or the Central Region as the most accident-prone road/region in Ghana.
The Authority described the reports which asserted that in early 2018, the NSRA disclosed that 60 percent of all crashes in Ghana occurred on that highway as unfortunate and called on the public to disregard it.
In a statement issued and signed by its Public Relations Officer (PRO), Pearl Adusu Gyasi and copied to the Ghana News Agency (GNA), said the situation made it implausible to describe the Accra-Cape Coast Road as the deadliest in Africa, as the reports suggested.
“The impression that 60 per cent of all crashes in Ghana for 2017 occurred on that road is incorrect. Instead, the fact is that the Accra-Cape Coast section of routes in the Central Region (Kasoa-Cape Coast) accounted for about 60 percent of all crashes in the Central Region (and not Ghana) for the year 2017”, the statement said.
“The 60 percent of all crashes (not deaths or fatalities) in the Central Region for 2017 was 558. For the same year, Central Region’s outlook for crashes, fatalities(deaths) and injuries were 11.9 percent, 12.0 percent, and 12.5 percent, respectively, and this ranked the region as the fourth for frequency of occurrence, fatalities (deaths) and casualties (deaths and injuries), after Greater Accra, Ashanti and Eastern regions for 2017”, it explained.
The three most dangerous roads in Ghana according to the 2017 statistics on road traffic crashes were the N1 Highway (Aflao to Elubo), N6 Highway (Accra to Kumasi) and N10 Highway (Kumasi through Techiman, Kintampo to Tamale).
The statement said though the Accra-Cape Coast Road was within the N1 Highway, the accident-prone sections were the Accra-Tema Motorway, Achimota Interchange to Mallam Junction to Weija, and Kasoa to Cape Coast.
It assured that the NRSA would continue to deploy multi-faceted approaches and strategies including outreach, enforcement and engineering measures to deal with key causes of issues of Inattentiveness/Distractive Road Usage and Speeding in the Region.
