History of Dune Bashing and Reckless Driving
Qatar is notorious for its exponentially increasing amount of car accidents every year. This has been attributed to obscure traffic codes, distractions, heavy traffic, and even youth boredom. The latter is particularly relevant to 'dune bashing' among the younger Qatari community. Qatar is known to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and certainly the Middle East, so an abundance of cars passed down by families to youth is not particularly surprising.
The wealthy youngsters then gather their friends on the weekends and perform dangerous stunts in sparse off-road areas like Sealine, or more commonly industrial roads like Lusail. This results in an outrageously high concentration of road accidents that halt traffic and cost the government ludicrous sums of money - as mentioned in our short documentary film, car accidents cost the Qatari government $5 billion (nearly QR 18 billion) from 2007 to 2012 alone, according to a report published by the Ministry of Interior.
The Qatari government is constantly implementing new laws and changes to put in an effort to decrease the country's notoriety and increase safety among citizens, for example decreasing the speed limit from 100kph to 80kph, with very hefty fines for disobeying. The fine for mobile phone usage is QR3,000. However, the laws weren't always so rigorous, in fact at one point they were quite lax because only very few people had cars to begin with. Only recently, in 2007, due to the high accident rate, have Qatari police become more rigorous.
In fact, statistical reports indicate that the number of road accidents have increased over 560% over the past 18 years. Soon enough, with only 2 million inhabitants and about 8,000 kilometers of roadways, Qatar began increasing in population due to expats who wish to work in the oil and gas industry. With one of the largest crude oil and natural gas supplies in the world, it should not be surprising that most people in Qatar own at least one car; the large amount of people driving means traffic is becoming a problem.
Susan Dun, assistant professor at Northwestern University's Office for Research, is recognised for her research on safe driving in Qatar. Dun recruited a team of student researchers to create a message campaign to change behaviors and promote safe driving in Qatar.
Dun notes that car accidents remain a leading cause of death in the country and her research focused on health communications and designing messages to encourage healthy behavior. Because of cultural differences in Qatar, Dun confronted obstacles in her research, which prevented her from using more traditional research methods such as focus groups. Instead, Dun fashioned the focus groups to resemble a more traditional form of communication in Doha – a majlis, which is used to describe a variety of special gatherings.
