Rethinking Road Safety in Ghana: Committing to vision zero for priceless human lives

The recent tragic deaths of six young women during the military recruitment stampede at the El-Wak Stadium in Accra have forced many of us to reflect on how seriously Ghana treats safety risks.

These events are not isolated; they occur during elections, protests, large gatherings, and almost daily on our roads.

Human life is priceless, but for policy and investment decisions, the U.S.

Department of Transportation currently assigns a statistical value of about $13.2 million per life (2023 dollars) to guide cost-benefit analyses.

The comparison underscores how advanced nations make safety a measurable, budgeted priority.

Road traffic fatalities remain one of Ghana’s most urgent public health challenges.

According to the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA), more than 2,494 people died in road crashes in 2024, with over 12,000 injuries recorded from 15,000 incidents nationwide.

The World Health Organization’s 2023 Ghana Country Profile similarly identifies road traffic injuries as a leading cause of death, particularly among young people.

While reviewing resources on the National Road Safety Authority’s website, I found that much of the NRSA’s focus remains on legislation and enforcement.

A press release from the Ministry of Transport notes that during the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety meeting held in Accra in late August, the Ministry’s Chief Director, Mabel Sagoe, outlined government’s efforts to address the crisis.

Citing NRSA data that attributes most crashes to human behaviour, she announced that the Ministry is reviewing Ghana’s road traffic laws.

Media reports, including Modern Ghana, have highlighted proposals under discussion such as regulating commercial motorcycle use, revising licensing requirements, and introducing vehicle emission testing to promote

environmental responsibility.

However, legislation alone cannot solve Ghana’s road safety problem. Unlike countries such as the United States and Canada, Ghana is not an automobile-centric society.

Vehicle ownership remains relatively low, with most registered vehicles concentrated in Accra and Kumasi.

Across much of the country, mobility primarily means walking to school, markets, healthcare, churches, mosques, and workplaces.

Yet the infrastructure for pedestrians — and to a lesser extent cyclists — is sorely lacking.

As a result, vulnerable road users, who account for more than 60% of road traffic fatalities nationwide, are forced to share unconstrained and often unsafe road space with vehicles and motorcycles of varying sizes.

Unless Ghana approaches road safety from this reality—recognising how people actually move and committing to a safe-system design inspired by Vision Zero—preventable deaths are likely to continue.

Vision Zero, first adopted in Sweden and now promoted globally by WHO and Bloomberg Philanthropies, emphasises that no loss of life is acceptable and that road systems must be designed to anticipate human error.

Ghana’s participation in the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety reflects an important step toward this paradigm shift.

A Worsening Pattern: 2025 Crash Data Shows Rising Danger

Fresh NRSA data covering January–August 2025 reveals an alarming and sustained increase in nearly every category of road trauma when compared to the same period in 2024:



These figures paint a clear picture: Ghana’s road safety crisis is worsening, not improving.

Each category’s upward trend is troubling, but the 20 percent rise in fatalities is particularly devastating.

It shows that crashes are not only more frequent — they are becoming more severe and more deadly.

This escalation suggests that Ghana’s road system is failing on multiple fronts: road design, user behaviour, speed management, enforcement, and protective measures for pedestrians and cyclists.

When fatalities rise this sharply in just one year, it signals that the system is not absorbing risk — it is amplifying it.

Ghana’s Current Efforts and Persistent Gaps.

The Government of Ghana has taken important steps to improve road safety.

The NRSA has strengthened its crash monitoring and reporting systems, and in 2025, the Ministry of Transport launched a renewed national road safety strategy intended to respond to rising fatalities.

However, the latest crash data exposes a widening gap between policy ambitions and lived realities.

Despite the improvements in reporting, the real-world outcomes on the roads show deteriorating safety conditions.

The Accra Road Safety Report (2024) confirms that pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists—those least protected in traffic—account for the majority of deaths.

This is not surprising. For decades, Ghana’s transportation investments have largely prioritised vehicle movement over human safety.

Critical deficits remain in:

• Safe pedestrian crossings and walkways.

• Protected bicycle lanes.

• Speed management in urban areas.

• Traffic-calming infrastructure.

• Public transport efficiency and reliability.

These gaps are structural and systemic—not merely behavioural.

Enforcement alone cannot resolve them.

Global evidence shows that legislation and penalties may improve compliance, but no police-driven strategy can reduce fatalities without safe infrastructure and road design reform.

For Ghana, the rising crash figures confirm that incremental improvements—while necessary—are not sufficient.

Lessons from Vision Zero: A Systems Approach That Works Vision Zero, implemented in cities like San Francisco and New York, is based on a simple but radical premise: road deaths are not accidents; they are failures of the system, and every one of them is preventable.

Vision Zero shifts responsibility away from blaming individuals and toward the institutions responsible for designing the transportation environment: planners, engineers, policymakers, and government agencies.

In San Francisco, where I contributed to Vision Zero efforts, geospatial crash data was used to identify the city’s most dangerous streets—referred to as “high-injury network.” Notably, the network is made up of only a small percentage of the city’s road network but accounted for the majority of severe and fatal crashes.

Targeting these locations with tailored interventions—better crossings, improved lighting, lane reconfigurations, and speed management— is helping reduce severe collisions leading to fatal and serious injuries. Ghana can adopt the same principles:

• Target the roads where most deaths occur.

• Design out risk rather than merely reacting to it.

• Build systems that protect human error, rather than punish it.

When safety is treated as a design responsibility, outcomes change.

A National Vision Zero Agenda for Ghana

To reverse the rising death toll, as a key focus of the NRSA, Ghana must adopt a coordinated Vision Zero agenda anchored in three pillars: safe infrastructure, safe systems, and safe speeds.

The specific goal of this agenda is to zero-down traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Key components should include:

1. A bold national target of zero deaths and serious injuries by 2050

Setting a long-term goal focuses national attention and aligns policy, investment, and institutional culture toward safety.

2. Targeted infrastructure investment

Ghana must prioritise interventions that protect vulnerable road users — pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists — through protected crossings, dedicated cycle lanes, median refuges, raised intersections, and traffic-calming measures in urban centres.

3. Data-driven enforcement

Enforcement should be guided by crash data, deployed where fatalities and injuries are concentrated, and linked to speed management strategies.

4. Cross-sector collaboration

Road safety is not just a transportation issue.

It requires coordination across transport planning, public health, education, law enforcement, and community engagement.

These measures support the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety (2021–2030), which calls for halving global traffic deaths by 2030. Ghana cannot achieve this without a systemic shift.

Conclusion

The tragedies we witness on our roads are not random; they are predictable outcomes of how we design, regulate, and manage transportation systems.

Vision Zero offers a proven, evidence-based pathway to protect human life.

Every Ghanaian life is irreplaceable.

No death should ever be viewed as the unavoidable cost of mobility.