The Global Imperative of Improving Road Safety Conditions

"These are real people, not statistics. I am not a statistic."
"I was involved in a road crash that totally changed my life and I continue to bear the consequences."
Bright Oyways, Association for Safe International Road Travel, Kenya

This is a health issue that we know the cure for. We could avoid the kind of senseless deaths that are taking place but we don't have the political will."
"We are doing something wrong. Maybe we aren't making enough noise."
Rochele Sobel, founder, Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT), U.S.

"Somehow society has accepted [traffic deaths and injuries] as the cost of living in our society these days."
"We call it an accident. It is not an accident."
Chana Widawski, Families for Safe Streets, New York

"We have invented the leading cause of death for our children and young people."
"Why have we accepted for so long a transport system that is killing so many people? It doesn't have to be like that."
"Road traffic deaths and injuries can be prevented. The key is political will. The key is the head of state decides to make this an important priority on his or her agenda."
Etienne Krug, director, social determinants of health, World Health Organization

"Why should we have a completely different acceptable-risk level in road safety?:
"From an ethical standpoint we are saying that no one should be killed or suffer a lifelong injury in road traffic."
"We can't build a road system based on the belief that everyone is perfect. No other system is built like that."
Maria Krafft, head, traffic safety, Swedish Transport Administration

Mikael Ullen    Representatives and participants from more than 80 countries at the 3rd Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety taking place in Stockholm, Sweden.

Traffic safety, and road accidents take lives and create injuries that will change peoples' lives forever. An instant is all it takes for a driver to lose control of a vehicle, for attention to waver, for a driver to fail to notice oncoming traffic, or warning signs. Then there is the issue of driver impairment, whether alcohol or drugs are involved. The fact that so many people drive with their minds elsewhere than on the road, impulsively responding to a cellphone, irrespective of whether it's hand-held or secured, represents yet another potential danger.

Careless driving, speeding, can end up in an accident where a driver, passengers or those in another vehicle are killed or injured. Then there are traffic deaths involving people on bicycles, motorcycles, or pedestrians. Whatever the cause the damage to human health and life is irreparable. When the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving began their campaign against carnage on the roads from impaired drivers the issue was simply ignored as though this was a societal ill that had to be accepted, despite road-safety driving laws.

That group's tireless campaigning made society take a second look at what they were accepting as inevitable, tarnishing the lens of impaired driving perception, and making it a focus of an unacceptable cause of too many road deaths. MADD's campaign had great dividends; society no longer accepts that this is an offshoot of the love affair with driving, that a responsibility comes with driving, and drinking while under the influence is not to be tolerated. But then, nor is speeding, or inattention.

Except that people are prone to both, and everyone not only makes errors of judgement, such as running an orange/red light, or failing to stop at an intersection, or allowing attention on the road to wander, because we are, after all, only human, and may live to regret what we may cause. On the other hand, traffic-law enforcement and municipal and state/provincial road and highway infractions would be lessened if more careful attention were to be given to urging caution on the road by mandating adequate speed limits in people-vulnerable areas.

Seven-thousand four-hundred shoes, each pair representing one of the road crash victims who die every day.

Statistics tell us that every day around the world a toll of 3,700 deaths take place in traffic accidents. Sweden, Norway and a handful of other countries have taken practical steps to reduce those numbers substantially; if they can reduce road deaths on their highways, it can be done anywhere with enough political resolve. Figures tell us that in 2016, there were 1.36-million traffic-related deaths worldwide. These deadly crashes now represent the leading cause of death for children and young people between the ages of five and 29, globally.

This week, the third annual Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety took place in Stockholm, its purpose to gather national representatives with a view to agreeing pursue a new commitment in reducing traffic deaths and serious injuries by fifty percent within the decade. It is a startling fact that the issue of mounting traffic-related deaths receives relatively little public attention -- until and unless such an accident occurs to you or someone you know and care for.

The representative of the organization Families for Safe Streets explained their pursuit of personal stories of traffic tragedies that have persuaded them to make use of civil disobedience as an attention gathering tool in their agenda to strive for changes to make streets safer. While global issues such as climate change capture peoples' attention, one much closer to home and infinitely more imminent and destructive for the moment, is little-noticed.

"Where is the sense of  urgency for road crashes?" was the rhetorical question lobbed by Egyptian youth activist Omnia el Omrahi, comparing how fixated and how swiftly the world has focused its attention on the novel coronavirus out of Wuhan, China. Sweden's pilot project of Vision Zero has amply demonstrated what can be done with the determination of the public and local civic administrations. Reducing speed limits to 30 kilometres/h is feasible in areas where vulnerable populations interact with traffic to prevent traffic deaths.

Many urban neighbourhoods have introduced 30 km/h speed limits in school districts and urban neighbourhoods, but many more need to focus on doing just that in the interests of child safety. Sweden continues to aim for its goal of zero traffic deaths, while in Norway, Oslo recorded one traffic death in 2019, and no pedestrian deaths whatever. Canada's traffic death count has recently been diminished, yet remains double at least that of many countries in Europe where road design and traffic safety remain high priorities.

Sweden operates a safe system approach to traffic based on the concept of human error, recognizing it as a vulnerability that no one should suffer throughout their life as a result of sustaining a serious injury. Road systems were designed traditionally on the theory that no one should make errors in a complex system where the risks are well understood. But driving a vehicle and adhering to such a standard makes little sense when no other enterprise engages with public safety in such an offhand manner.

Highways are best divided where speed limits exceed 80 km/h. Technology such as geo-fencing, to control speed limits for vehicles such as delivery trucks, re[resemts yet another safety-related initiative. Along with speed limits not to exceed 30 km/h anywhere pedestrians and traffic share public space.

Photo: Vibhu Mishra:  Emergency services respond to a car accident in New York City, United States. Prompt response and medical assistance can help save lives in road crashes.