‘Crucial need to lower road deaths’

ROAD safety could be one of the biggest threats to human lives today.

This was the assessment made by Etienne Krug, the director for the management of Non-communicable Diseases, Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention at the World Health Organisation (WHO), at the Second High-level Conference on Road Safety in Brazil.

“A business-as-usual approach is not going to suffice. If we are to reach the goal of halving road deaths by 2020 we need to do more,” he said.

The world had, according to the Global Status Report on Road Safety 2015, using 2013 data, lost 1.25 million people on its roads.

Krug pointed out that HIV and Aids claimed 1.6 million people in the same time period (2013), while TB accounted for 1.4 million losses. Malaria killed close to 800 000 people.

“Yet we still do not recognise the danger.”

In countries like South Africa, development went hand in hand with improving road networks, but this should not necessarily have to translate into an increase in road fatalities.

Laws

He said changes needed to begin at country level in the form of good laws as well as law enforcement.

Infrastructure such as speed bumps and other traffic measures were relatively cheap, but effective.

“The problem is that we plan transportation systems around cars, and not around pedestrians and cyclists, who are most vulnerable.” UN Technical officer Tami Toroyan agreed with Krug, and said that half the world’s road users were pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, yet roads were not built with them in mind.

South African Margie Peden, the co-ordinator of Unintentional Injury Prevention at WHO, said the spate of deaths on roads could take its toll on the country’s economy since younger people (between the ages of 15 and 29) were often killed.

“These are the economically active people who are dying.”

She said road networks needed to be accommodating of human error.

“People make mistakes; it’s that simple. We also need to embrace a system that targets road users like pedestrians and drivers, and start looking at the road system itself.”