Assessment of Road Traffic Accident And Safety Interventions in Southwestern Nigeria

Despite the various safety interventions on our roads, mobility as the main goal of transport is not still achieved because of the transport negativity of accidents, which cause death and injuries due to varying factors. These interventions have been executed in generic form but little attention has been accorded (localized and state-specific) in Nigeria transport research. This study was carried out to examine causative factors, variations in occurrence state-specificaccident causes and safety interventions deployed in Southwestern Nigeria. Accidents records of Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) were extracted between 2020 and 2024 from Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) coupled with 493 questionnaires administered to FRSC officers from Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti states seeking safety interventions strategies, using simple random sampling. Road traffic accidents in Southwestern Nigeria remain a serious traffic safety concerns driven majorly by human behavioral factors, basically speed violation (69.47%). The pattern of accidents among these states show that Ogun (38.11%), Lagos (13.56%) and Oyo (18.36%) bear the most burden of accidents. The accidents among these states are varied statistically and significantly in the study periods. The study concludes that existing measures are more effective in education awareness and campaigns creation rather than technological strategies. The study recommends that speed enforcement, speed limit device installation and compliance should be prioritized and extended to personal vehicles, routine inspection checks administration on vehicles system components in Lagos and Ekiti, and special intervention programmes of defensive driving should be tailored towards Ogun, Osun, Oyo and Ondo in addition to vehicle checks