How NOT to prevent road accidents

Turkish news channel NTV ran a story on Oct. 7. The story, read by a speaker on the radio, sounded quite cohesive, logical and consistent in a country where such news narratives are extremely rare.

According to the story, the Interior Ministry just released a directive to prevent road accidents. Very well. After all, 7,530 Turks died in road accidents in 2015, several times more than those who died in terror attacks in the same year.

The directive orders new measures designed to reduce the number of road accidents. That is good news. But how? By increasing the number and frequency of checkpoints "specifically at times and routes where drivers are believed to have the habit of drinking and driving." That, too, is normal. The police in every civilized country routinely carry out checkpoint examinations against drinking and driving. All the same, the "Turkishness" about the story was something else.

The Interior Ministry's directive, according to the NTV report, said the new check point controls against drinking and driving would be performed between 10 pm and 2 am on weekends. There is nothing unusual about that. Those are the good hours to catch drivers with drinking habits. But then the story went on to say that the Interior Ministry's statistics revealed that most road accidents on weekends - the target days of checkpoints - occurred between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. So the police will start checking drunken drivers two hours after the worst crash period of the day has passed.

In fact, the statistics that tell us most accidents occur at times when drivers are not generally believed to be drunken and driving should also tell us that if the Turkish state hopes to reduce road accidents it should do something better than breathalyzing drivers...