My driving ambition
Road casualties are falling in the G8 countries - but elsewhere they're reaching epidemic levels. We must make road safety a global issue.
Each year, 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic crashes worldwide. Unless action is taken, global road deaths are forecast to double by 2020. Most of these deaths happen in developing countries. Worst affected are vulnerable road users, children, pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. Today, road traffic injuries are already the number one killer of 10-25 year olds. Yet much of this tragic loss of life is preventable.
In the industrialised countries, our road casualties have been falling for three decades. We are becoming ever more sophisticated in designing road safety systems. We now expect cars to have achieved five stars in independent crash tests. We expect crumple zones, air bags, and electronic stability control. We expect roads to have five-star safety design, too. And we expect road users to wear seat belts and helmets, to avoid excessive speed and drink driving.
Yet, on the streets of South East Asia, South America and Africa, we are facing an avoidable epidemic of death and injury on the road. Today, road crashes kill on the scale of malaria or tuberculosis, yet the international community has not woken up to this horrific waste of life. 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 (WHO) estimates that 200,000 die each year, despite a relatively low level of motorisation. The cost of road injury to developing countries alone is estimated at up to $100bn a year - equivalent to all overseas aid from donor governments - but road safety is not recognised as a development priority.
At last, the United Nations has begun to recognise the issue. This week is the first ever United Nations Global Road Safety Week, highlighting the appalling fact that over 1,000 young people are killed on the road every day. The World Bank has established a Global Road Safety Facility and, together with the WHO, is working to promote effective strategies for road traffic injury prevention. But still missing are the high-level political commitment and the financial resources to give global road safety the attention it clearly deserves.
That is why l am delighted to serve as a member of the independent Commission for Global Road Safety, chaired by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Our report, "Make Roads Safe", recommends a number of actions that could begin to reverse the rise in road traffic injuries in low and middle-income countries, including a $300m, ten-year action plan to develop road safety skills within countries, a 10% minimum funding allocation for road safety in all road projects funded with international aid, and a UN ministerial conference to examine the potential contribution road safety can make to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
Action on this scale could make a difference. For example, in Africa, prompted by the Make Poverty History campaign, the G8 leaders of the major industrialised countries have committed to double aid and to improve Africa's road infrastructure. Less than 20% of roads in sub-Saharan Africa are paved, and the Commission for Africa recommended that at least 150,000km of new roads would be needed in the region. But unless road safety is recognised as a priority, the impact of increased G8 investment in roads may make an already bad situation even worse.
Roads constructed only to carry goods from A to B as fast as possible, roads designed to the lowest and cheapest specification, roads which have not been designed with safety in mind, will add to the danger on the world's most dangerous road network. African transport ministers have adopted a target to halve the region's road traffic fatalities by 2015. The challenge now is to meet this ambitious goal and to ensure that in the drive to build new roads to help make poverty history we also remember to make these roads safe.
To build support for this effort, a coalition of road safety organisations has come together to establish the Make Roads Safe campaign. This campaign has launched a petition here calling on the United Nations to organise the first ever global ministerial summit on road safety, to foster governmental cooperation and to give road safety the political profile and priority it deserves. I am particularly pleased that prime minister Tony Blair has already given his strong support to the campaign.
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. Will we share this knowledge with countries that are struggling to recognise, let alone confront, their road injury problems? Or will we let India and Kenya, Vietnam and Bolivia repeat the mistakes that we made in the past, and even add fuel to the fire by providing them with billions of dollars in aid for new unsuitable and unsafe roads.
In my racing career, I survived some very high-speed impacts. I am still alive today 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. This "Vision Zero" approach may sound like science fiction, but increasingly it guides the policies of those countries with the most effective road safety performance in the world.
In the end, it comes down to how many road fatalities we are prepared to tolerate. And, at the moment, the answer from the international community seems to be that we should tolerate one death every 30 seconds. There is a better alternative and that is to begin to take action to make roads safe.
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