Common Causes of Road Accidents

Car accidents are very common in the city and throughout the rest of the country. While some are relatively minor, thousands of lives are taken every year by horrible car crashes. Drivers have a duty to drive carefully and avoid causing foreseeable injuries to other motorists. Unfortunately, not all drivers successfully carry out that duty (King, 2016). The causes of car accidents can seem endless and also many variables factor into accidents on the road. Therefore, this assignment will discuss about the causes of road accident (Delbridge,2019).

Frist and foremost, one of the causes of road accident is teenage drivers. This is because teens don’t have the experience to know what to do in dangerous conditions and that inexperience causes accidents. According to Twisk (1995), the teenagers have limited skills, but have high opinions about themselves as drivers, they like to be on the road a lot and primarily under the risky conditions, they have many extra motives in the sense that car driving as an activity means a lot to them.

They enjoy risky activities like racing but they do not see the consequences, are easily affected by peer group appraisal.

Secondly, the other causes of road accident are unskilled drivers. Road accidents occur due to untrained and unskilled drivers (Abdul and Ansa, 2012). According to Ansari et al. (2000) the drivers are poor driving skill such as violation of traffic rules, for example, driving at excess speed, ignoring crossing signals, unsafe overtaking and unsafe making incorrect U turns. This all is because of insufficient driving experience.

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According to Road Transport Department Malaysia (JPJ), the driver had to passed the practical test and owned the Provisional Driving License (PDL) for 2 years, after the 2 years period, the driver needed to renew their license to Competent Driving License (CDL). In certain cases, the driver that owned the CDL are still lack of driving skill. This is because of they didn’t collect the driving experience in the 2 years period of holding the PDL.

Besides, the weather may be also one of the causes of an accident. Dense fog, excessive rain, slick roads, and high winds can all cause major problems for drivers. Even extreme differences in temperature can create large potholes worthy of damaging a car. During the heavy rain, most of the driver was unclear to the road condition, they unable to changing lanes and sudden break (emergency break) will also lead to road accident (Staver, no date).

Distraction to driver is also one of the causes of road accident (O.E.B. Law, no date). Distractions could be outside or inside the vehicle. The major distraction now a days is using mobile phone while driving. Act of talking on phone occupies major portion of brain and the smaller part handles the driving skills. This division of brain hampers reaction time and ability of judgement. This becomes one of the reasons of road accident. Some of others distraction to driver could be adjusting mirrors while driving, looking animals on the road, paying attention to banners and billboards, let alone kids, eating, and applying makeup (Transport Department, no date).

Last but not least, most of the fatal accidents occur due to excessive speeding. Increase in speed multiplies the risk of accident and severity of injury during accident (Vanlaar and Yannis, 2006). Faster vehicles are more prone to accident than the slower one. Higher the speed, greater the risk. A slower vehicle comes to halt immediately while faster one takes long way to stop and also skids a long distance due to law of notion. A vehicle moving on high speed will have greater impact during the crash and hence will cause more injuries. The ability to judge the forthcoming events also gets reduced while driving at faster speed which causes error in judgment and finally a crash (Rolison et al., 2018).