Yangon: Myanmar is seeking to bring down the car accident death rate under a drafted national road safety strategy action plan which is part of a Southeast Asian regional one, Myanmar Times reported Tuesday.

The plan, which would be implemented in three phases once it was approved by the government, would seek to cut the car accident death rate to 20 per 10,000 vehicles from 27 per 10,000 vehicles in 2003, the road transport authorities were quoted by the newspaper as saying.

The first phase of the plan will include road safety education campaign, it said.

There were over 1,300 deaths of road accidents across Myanmar in 2003.

The country has more than 900,000 registered motor vehicles including motor-cycles as of August this year with 4,000 to 5,000 cases of road accidents reported annually.

As over 50 percent of the registered vehicles are motorcycles, the plan has prescribed that 90 percent of motorcyclists are to wear helmets and 70 percent of the drivers to use seat belts to help reduce death and injury
rate.

The regional road safety strategy, approved at a meeting of transport ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Phnom Penh last November, is expected to save more than 900 lives in Myanmar during the next five years, it added.

The regional road safety strategy was drafted under guidelines of the Asian Development Bank.