A Saudi official announced that the death rate from traffic accidents in the Kingdom has been reduced by more than half, marking a sign of improvement in a country that sees some of the highest rates of traffic accident deaths in the world.

The head of the National Transformation Program, Mohamed Al-Tuwaijri, said that the number of annual deaths decreased from 9,000 to about 4,000.

Al-Tuwaijri explained that the number of traffic accident deaths decreased by 51 percent through the development of the traffic system and the policies that were launched to reduce the number of accidents and deaths resulting from them.