‘Road’ Accidents

[Anchor Lead]

One out of six traffic accidents occurs in places that are not legally ‘roads,’ such as the roads inside apartment complexes or parking garages of supermarket chains. Both pedestrians and drivers must be extra cautious as the sheer number of pedestrians in those settings tends to produce more casualties than accidents on the roads.

[Pkg]

A car is moving at a slow pace inside an apartment complex. But it runs into a child that ran out from between the parked cars.

[Soundbite] Are you okay?

A child on a bicycle came out of nowhere and bumped into a car before falling to the ground. A pedestrian was crossing the street inside an apartment complex, but a driver just strikes her without stopping. This vehicle that was driving over the center line collided with another car on the access ramp. A local insurance company studied about five million traffic accident claims it received in the past three years and found that one out of six cases occurred in non-road areas, such as the private access roads in apartment complexes or parking lots of large supermarkets. Accidents on private roads increased at a rate three times faster than accidents on public roads. Such a high number of accidents is due to an increase in the number of roads in private properties such as large apartment complexes or supermarket franchises. Since there is a large number of pedestrians in such settings, the number of casualties in non-road accidents was 1.4 times higher than those in ordinary traffic accidents. However, roads in private properties are not governed by the Road Traffic Act, so it's not easy to punish the drivers that cause accidents.

[Soundbite] Lim Chae-hong(Samsung Traffic Safety Research Institute) : "Since it's outside of the law, those who cause accidents are not penalized properly. It's hard to say that it's clearly in violation of the law, so sometimes victims can be blamed."

A revision bill to strengthen the responsibility of drivers even in the roads in private properties was tabled in the National Assembly, but it has been pending for eight months now at the standing committee.