A Review of Dubai Road Safety Culture: Realities & Challenges

Dubai is well known for its best road infrastructure in the world. Despite high quality roads, grade separated intersections and well-designed traffic signals, the city experiences high road fatality rate in comparison to developed countries cities. Improving road safety is a major challenge for authorities due to extremely diverse socio-cultural background of Dubai’s population. Road traffic injury is the leading cause of death among children and other vulnerable road users in the UAE. Extensive literature review indicates that driver behavior is influenced by demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological factors among others act as a precursor to major motor vehicle crashes. Driver behavior is the major contributory factor in traffic crashes in the UAE. The influence of socioeconomic factors and safety culture on Dubai driver behavior has not been explored yet. One of the uniqueness about Dubai’s commercial drivers are they are all migrant workers (mostly from Asian, African, and other developing countries). This uniqueness needs to explore in relationship between socio-cultural, economic, and religious factors and its impact on road safety by studying behavior of professional drivers in the fast-growing city of Dubai. This paper will present a review about Dubai road safety issues and problem revealed by a research study conducted to understand the impact of socio-economic factor on professional driver behavior. The findings show positive correlation between socio-cultural, economic factors and aberrant driver behavior but fatalism associated with religion needs further research.