Survey: Road users say they feel safer travelling on roads in western Uganda

Road users in Uganda feel safest while traveling in the western region of the country other than any other region, a survey has proved.

The survey was conducted by the Uganda Road Fund (URF), an agency that is mandated to finance routine and periodic maintenance of all public roads to ensure the best services to road users responding to their needs.

The survey involved involved randomly selecting and interviewing road users at predetermined points on all categories of public roads including national roads which are managed by the the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), city roads managed by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), district roads managed by the various districts and urban roads managed by Town Councils and municipal authorities.

According to the findings, road users perceived roads in the western region as the safest and this accounted to over 74% of the total number that was interviewed.

The Eastern region accounted for 60% safety and therefore came second while Kampala followed with 56% perceived safety.

Roads in central and Northern region scored lowest with their safety scores less than 50% of respondents who said they feel safe on the roads in the two regions.

Roads manned by UNRA were also considered safest in the 2019 survey and these were followed by KCCA roads.

According to the respondents, the reasons for not feeling safe on the roads included narrowness which contributes to 26%, potholes 20%, dust 15%, reckless driving 11% and poor signage 6%.

The sample of the 2019 survey included 2,800 road users constituting pedestrians, cyclists, passengers, car drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers and truck drivers.

According to URF, the data users was undertaken between February and March 2019 with the reference period being the 12 months before the date of data collection.

The survey also found out that about 57% of road users were satisfied with the road network this year compared to the 27% in the last survey two years ago.

This will also go down as the year with the highest percentage of satisfied road users since the survey started in 2012.