Exporting the three Es – engineering, enforcement and education

Road safety measures introduced in the UK should be transported overseas and used to reduce the catalogue of death and injury in crashes in developing countries.

Promoting the benefits of the three ‘Es’ around the world – engineering, enforcement and education – is fundamental to curtailing the growing epidemic of road deaths, which sees someone killed or maimed on the world’s roads every six seconds, say safety campaigners.

Fleet operators are being urged to back the call for United Nations’ action to stem the carnage by signing an online petition launched by the ‘Make Roads Safe’ campaign, which has been established by the independent Commission for Global Road Safety. The petition, which has attracted more than 400,000 names, will be delivered to UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon in advance of a key debate in March 2008. It calls for the first ever global ministerial meeting on road safety (see David Ward’s opinion article below). Globally 1.2 million people are killed on the roads annually and 50 million injured. Road crashes are predicted to double in the developing world over the next decade, unless the international community begins to take serious action to tackle the problem.

Safety net

UK International Development Minister Gareth Thomas said: “In poor countries that have no fi nancial safety net, this can plunge millions of families into poverty. Unlike HIV and AIDS, we have simple solutions to help cut deaths on the roads such as basic safety measures, better designed roads, education and more effective law enforcement.”

Britain has some of the safest roads in the world despite the fact that more than 3,000 people are killed each year and over 250,000 injured. With the possibility of two million road deaths globally by 2020, according to some forecasters, former Road Safety Minister Dr Stephen Ladyman, said: “I hope that the lessons we continue to learn here in the UK will have relevance elsewhere. If we can keep improving our understanding of road and vehicle design, we will be in a better position to offer pragmatic advice to other countries as their economies expand and more money becomes available to make improvements.”

Warned

However, Lord Robertson, chairman of the Commission for Global Road Safety, has warned that despite road crashes being the leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 10 and 25, road safety is not in the strategies for delivering the Millennium Development Goals, which have a target year of 2015.

He said: “By 2015 road crashes are predicted by the World Health Organisation to be the main cause of life-shortening disability for children over the age of four in the developing world, with immense associated health and social costs.To address this, one of our main proposals is for a UN Ministerial Conference on global road safety, which for the first time would bring together government ministers from across the world to discuss and agree strategies and partnerships for tackling the road injury epidemic.”

‘Make Roads Safe’ campaigners argue that by neglecting road safety the international community – the G8 group of the world’s most industrialised nations, the UN, and the governments of middle and low income countries themselves – are putting their wider developmental and public health objectives at risk. The UK supporters of the international ‘Make Roads Safe’ campaign include: British Red Cross, Brake, FIA Foundation, Living Streets, Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS), RAC Foundation, RoadSafe, RoSPA, Transaid and UK Youth.

The UK Government has backed calls for a UN summit as emerging countries battle to overcome the confl ict between road deaths and poverty, which sees billions of pounds being spent on caring for road accident victims instead of being used to alleviate the harshest of living conditions.

Lord Robertson said: “Half of the families in India and Bangladesh which lose a breadwinner drop through the trapdoor into poverty. Road crashes are costing the developing world up to $100 billion a year; money that could be spent on schools and hospitals and economic development. We must respond to this epidemic, which ranks with HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis as a truly global killer.”

With Britain investing ‘significant sums’, according to Dr Ladyman, to help make the country’s roads among the safest in the world, he wants many of the measures introduced here to be adopted by poorer people, in poorer countries as vehicle use and urbanisation increase rapidly.

Escalate

As the economic costs of road accidents around the world continue to escalate, UK initiatives to further curtail crash carnage include:

Strategies to improve safety for those who drive for work - by targeting employers and employees through education, an outreach programme managed by RoadSafe, and publicity

Police moves to ramp up the level of enforcement on drink driving

Increased enforcement and publicity on the wearing of seat belts

Greater consistency of local speed limits across the country

Moves to reform and modernise the driver training and testing system so that people learn how to drive safely, not just how to master a car

Measures to improve safety for moped and motorcycle riders following the 2005 publication by the Government of its ‘Motorcycling Strategy’ - the first of its kind in Europe and, possibly, in the world

The promotion of child pedestrian training and good practice in road safety education

Working with vehicle manufacturers to improve in-car safety systems such as current demands for electronic stability control to be more commonplace.

Dr Ladyman said: “We are working closely with other countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden to improve standards. They – like the UK – have some of the safest roads in the world.

Recognise

“But we recognise that many developing countries simply do not have the resources to invest in road safety to the extent we do. In those situations, road safety provisions have to be tailored to meet the practical needs and the realities of the situation on the ground.

“All these initiatives will, I believe, contribute to safer roads and better understanding of road safety.

“In the past, some countries might have downplayed the importance of such detailed strategies, seeing individual deaths and injuries more as one-off accidents or random events.

We know better now. It’s crucial we try and minimise the carnage taking place on roads around the world.

“Through better technology. Better information. More and better education. It is a huge task, but the potential rewards are huge too. In economic terms. In public health terms. But most importantly, in terms of the millions of lives we can save. An avoidable epidemic, on the scale of TB or malaria, which kills over one million people a year, is being tolerated by the international community when simple actions could be taken to start bringing it under control.”

Ex-Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher said: “There are reasons to be optimistic. We have the vaccine for this epidemic of road deaths. In the industrialised nations we have demonstrated over 30 years that we can reduce road deaths even as traffic levels grow. In my racing career I survived some very high-speed impacts because the sport’s governing body designed a system where safety is the prime consideration, where the car, the track and the rules work together to try to ensure that the inevitable crashes will not be fatal.

In the end, it comes down to how many road fatalities we are prepared to tolerate. There is a better alternative, and that is to begin to take action to make roads safe.”

Why we MUST stop the global road deaths epidemic

Every day an epidemic of road injury kills more than 3,000 people worldwide. It strikes hardest at the poor and the vulnerable. It is particularly savage with our young – a child is killed or injured on the roads every minute. In fact, according to the latest figures, road traffic deaths are the number one killer of 10-24 year olds globally.

The epidemic is growing at a catastrophic rate. But it is a disease of developing countries, and economies in transition. In industrialised countries our road casualties have been falling for three decades.

Our road safety systems are becoming ever more sophisticated. Consumers expect crumple zones, airbags, electronic stability control and assisted braking. Increasingly we want roads to have five-star safety design too.

If our data shows a particular problem, such as child pedestrian deaths in the UK, we work to fix it. Yet on the streets of Asia, Latin America and Africa deaths and injuries are rising, and predicted to increase for years to come, and almost nobody is trying to fix it.

Already, China and India each lose at least 100,000 people a year to road crashes. In Africa, which has the most dangerous roads in the world, the World Health Organisation estimates that 200,000 people die each year, despite a relatively low level of motorisation. The response to this global epidemic from our politicians and media has been disappointing.

Road crashes kill on the scale of malaria or tuberculosis, yet road injury is not being combated by international taskforces or United Nations’ agencies.

The cost of road injury to developing countries alone is estimated at up to $100 billion a year - equivalent to all overseas aid from donor governments - yet road safety is not recognised as a development priority.

Take the G8, the group of eight of the world’s leading industrialised nations including Britain, and the ‘Make Poverty History’ agenda. In 2005, following months of campaigning which caught the public imagination and culminated in the Live8 concerts, a new funding deal for African development was agreed.

A large element of this new aid was earmarked for improving Africa’s infrastructure, including roads, in order to assist economic development and facilitate trade. Less than 20% of roads in sub-Saharan Africa are paved, and Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa recommended that at least 150,000 kilometres of new roads would be needed in the region.

The Infrastructure Consortium for Africa, charged with implementing this spending, met in Berlin in January. Despite the billions of dollars of new investment for roads under discussion, road safety was not on the agenda.

Unless safety is recognised as a priority, aspirations to ‘Make Poverty History’ will result in a new generation of unsafe roads in Africa, constructed only to carry goods from A to B as fast as possible and designed to the lowest and cheapest specification. They will alienate communities and kill the people who use them.

The challenge now is to ensure that in the effort to improve road infrastructure to help make poverty history we at the same time ensure that we make roads safe.

This is why the ‘Make Roads Safe’ campaign has been calling for a UN Ministerial conference on global road safety.

There are powerful arguments in favour of UN action on road safety, and the ‘Make Roads Safe’ campaign has welcomed the support of Tony Blair, Michael Schumacher, Desmond Tutu and other world leaders for a Ministerial conference.

Such a conference could take practical action to cut the 3,000 road deaths that happen every day, mostly in the middleand low-income countries. The UN already promotes best-practice road-safety standards on the use of seat belts, helmets and blood alcohol levels, and a conference could encourage developing nations to enforce such rules.

It would be a major step forward if these countries also adopted international standards for road traffic injury data collection. Industrialised countries register a fatality as anyone dying within 30 days of a crash, but many developing countries only count deaths at the roadside. As a result these countries fail to develop effective safety strategies.

Our campaign will continue to gain momentum over the coming months. We are collecting 1.2 million signatures – the number that die on the roads each year – in a petition at www.makeroadssafe.org.

This will be delivered to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon in advance of a key UN debate in March next year, which we hope will result in the first ever global ministerial meeting on road safety in 2009.

<< Back to contents page

• < previous article
• |
• next article >