After the great success of the program which was concluded recently in Riyadh City and in a bid to help make driving in the Kingdom safer, Ford Middle East in partnership with Al Jazirah Vehicles Agencies Co., the dealer for the Ford and Lincoln brands in the Kingdom, announced partnership with King Abdulaziz University to host the "Driving Skills for Life" program in Jeddah. Worth to mention that the free program which aims at educating students about the best safe driving practices and helping them to improve their road safety record, returns to King Abdulaziz University for the second time. The World Health Organization's statistics indicate that the vast majority of traffic accident victims are young people and that road accidents represent the second largest cause of death in the world for the 15 - 29 age group. The United Nations' report entitled "Youth and Road Safety" shows that each year, traffic accidents cause the death of 400,000 young people under the age of 25, and the statistics of the General Department of Traffic in the Kingdom showed that children and young people represent 72% of the deaths caused by traffic accidents.(Salamh.org http://bit.ly/22E0Pfk ) In addition, a recent Saudi study showed that the Kingdom suffers a loss of SR87.17 billion as a result of road accidents in the Kingdom (MBC- http://bit.ly/1VwImTB ). The Kingdom ranked second in the Arab world and twenty third worldwide with regards to road accidents, where the drivers in 45% of traffic accidents in Saudi Arabia are less than 30 years of age. In 2015, the "Najm" application registered more than 920,000 accidents in one year, an increase of 22% compared to 2014, and 29.7% of drivers had two or more accidents during this same year. The use of mobile telephones was among one of the most important reasons for the increase of traffic accidents during the past few years. Furthermore, 33.3% of accidents in Saudi Arabia were due to the fact that the driver did not leave sufficient space between himself and the vehicle in front of him. Car accidents are expected to be one of the main causes of deaths in the Kingdom. The "Driving Skills for Life" program is a national initiative for road safety created by Ford Motor Company in 2003 in cooperation with the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) and a panel of safety experts. The program has been adapted for each host market to reflect the local driving experience and the quality of the roads. In its first 10 years, the "Driving Skills for Life" program participated in training more than 30,000 young people in about 900 educational institutions in 39 states, in addition to 15 international markets across Europe, Asia and North America. In 2013, the program made its debut in the Middle East, in the United Arab Emirates, followed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Sultanate of Oman during the last three years.
