PHUKET: The Seven Days of Danger road safety campaign produced some extraordinary figures that deserve further explanation as soon as possible.

Nine people died on Phuket's roads in the New Year period, a dramatic increase on the previous toll of six.

Yet in Phang Nga, Phuket's neighboring province, where Phuketwan encountered two serious crashes in a 24-hour stay late last month, there was not one fatality.
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Readers will recall that in Phang Nga in 2012, four young Swedes and their driver were wiped out in a single crash and a bus running off a road accounted for five more deaths.

Statistics are always going to tell lies, especially over just one week in a year that consists of 52 weeks.

This is why Phuketwan earnestly hopes that Public Health officials will resume updating road toll statistics on a monthly basis, as they did for many years.

In April last year, the figures stopped coming, so we have no way of knowing whether the battle to reduce the road toll is being won or not.

Transparency is essential on Phuket, in every aspect of life and business. The monthly figures were a good guide to the most important statistic of all: the life and death one.

They must be restored immediately so that the media can constantly make people aware of the 52-weeks-a-year dangers.

To highlight one week - perhaps the most dangerous week - is good. But the dangers are ever-present.

The road toll figures were coupled with the drowning figures, the danger zone in which too many tourists lose their lives each year.

We can't give you official figures, but we can tell you that eight tourists drowned on Phuket's popular west coast beaches in a horrifying eight-week period from mid-May to mid-July last year.

This period marked the arrival of the monsoon, and it will be important this year for serious action to be taken to make sure this needless catastrophe does not reoccur.

Phuket's future as a year-round beach destination relies on being safe year-round.

As for the roads, we can confirm that too many expats ride motorcycles when they shouldn't, and die as a result. The locals are wiser and still die needlessly, from making the same errors of judgement.

Across all of Thailand, the death toll was a massive 365 people, with 3329 injured in 3176 crashes.

The death toll was up by 29, or 8.63 percent. Phuket was statistically much, much worse than that.

But it was only one week out of 52 on Phuket. We hope that figures for all of 2012, whenever they are released, will show a general reducion in the numbers of deaths on the road, and drownings.