WHO calls for Decade of Action for Road Safety opportunities to be taken

Date: 4/7/2012

The Decade of Action for Road Safety, which was launched last year, represents an opportunity to significantly cut down on the number of people who are killed on the world's roads.

That is according to Dr Etienne Krug, Director of the Department of Violence and Injury Prevention at the World Health Organization (WHO), who has written a blog for the Guardian on the subject.

He pointed towards the initiative, which was launched in May last year and taken up by in excess of 100 countries, as an important chance to improve road safety.

Extra emphasis has been put on the countries which have had a poor record in the past through failure to rectify issues.

Dr Krug said: "For the first time, we have a real chance of stopping, and even reversing, the rising number of global road deaths."

The decade in which to implement such change runs from 2011 to 2020 with the estimated impact of not tackling road safety being predicted as costing 1.9 million deaths a year by the time the ten years is up.

At present the figure is 1.2 million worldwide, which equates to 150 people an hour and within the 15 to 29-year-old age group represents a bigger threat to life than HIV, Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.

The impact on families can go further than just the emotional as three-quarters of road deaths are men, who are often the sole breadwinners in many parts of the world.

Road infrastructure and driver behaviour varies hugely across the world and the countries worst affected have rates at around ten times those in the least affected places.

The death rate in the Netherlands stands at 4.8 in 100,000 whereas in Argentina it rises to 13.7 and in the Philippines it is 20.

When you look at the figures for Africa it is more startling with South Africa reporting a 33.2 in 100,000 death rate, Egypt 41.6 and Eritrea 48.4.

Posted by Nick Anderson

International Transport News and Sustainable Transport News