Jeddah Traffic Chief Mohammed Al-Qahtani has said that improvements to the congestion in the city's streets will come upon the completion of infrastructure work, but that the problem will never be fully addressed without a radical change in attitude towards public transport. “The vast majority of journeys are conducted in private vehicles, and public transport, if we ignore a few private buses, hardly exists at all,” Al-Qahtani told Okaz earlier this week. Public transport, he said, accounts for no more than two percent of circulation in the city. “Even school transport is insufficient,” Al-Qahtani said, “and pupils and teachers alike all have to use private cars to get to school.” Another source of discontent, Al-Qahtani said, is the huge number of parking infractions. In the first ten months of this year, traffic police registered 129,665 instances of illegal parking, 67,651 due to Saudis and the rest due to foreigners, according to Al-Qahtani. “This has an extremely bad effect, but unfortunately there is a lack of parking space in some older commercial areas,” he said. The Jeddah Traffic chief also revealed that his force receives approximately 3,500 calls per day to report accidents. “We always try to send as soon as possible the nearest patrol to the scene, but often the traffic back-up caused by the accident itself prevents them from getting there as swiftly as we would like,” Al
