Bulgaria's troubles with building new roads and repairing the existing ones are well documented and have been a target of intense media scrutiny for months. The poor quality of the road infrastructure has been often blamed for the high number of traffic accidents in Bulgaria, so the Transport Ministry is preparing a series of measures to fix that, a two-day seminar on European Union road transport policy and road infrastructure safety, held in Sofia on July 15 and 16, was told.

The ministry's main priorities to cut the number of road accidents include harmonising the basic rules of traffic safety, in line with the trend of setting up unified rules throughout the EU; improving the exchange of information with other EU member countries and implementation of good practices in terms of accident prevention; and improving controls on observance of rules regarding driving time, breaks and rests of drivers of vehicles for public transportation of passengers and cargo, Deputy Transport Minister Krassimira Martinova told the seminar.

Furthermore, the ministry would seek to improve the way it organises road safety campaigns and targets the relevant audience, she said, as quoted by Bulgarian news agency BTA.

Hopes are that infrastructure can be further improved through the regular series of independent road safety audits, to be carried out by the European Union Road Federation (ERF) throughout the bloc's 27 countries. Trained road engineers would look mainly for deficiencies in road marking and missing road signs, ERF director of operations Francesco Falco said, quoted by Bulgarian news agency Focus. ERF is a non-profit association that aims to co-ordinate views on Europe's road sector.

Road infrastructure, clearly, was not the only reason for traffic accidents, according to Valentin Panchev, state expert on road safety at the Transport Ministry. The most often mentioned causes of traffic accidents in Bulgaria were driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs and speeding, Focus quoted Panchev as saying. More than 20 000 Bulgarians had had their driving licences revoked for breaching traffic regulations in 2007, he said.

Revoking licences and the periodic safe driving campaigns have had a small impact on the death toll of road accidents, Interior Ministry statistics show. The number of crashes in 2007 fell by 2.2 per cent on the year to about 8000, while the number of people killed on the roads decreased by 3.3 per cent to 1004. In the period January 1-July 15 2008, the death toll was 509 in 3966 crashes, compared with 507 who died in 4073 accidents over the same period of 2007.

The number of accidents traditionally increases in summer months because of the higher number of tourists, and also because freight carriers at the height of harvest season routinely overload trucks, while the truck drivers often disregard driving time and rest regulations, the Transport Ministry said on July 11.

As a means of prevention, the motor vehicle administration executive agency of the ministry has launched mass checks along the Black Sea coast, paying special attention to buses carrying tourists and trucks carrying construction materials and building waste to and from construction sites, the ministry said in a statement on its website.