UN: Forget Terrorism Threats, Try Crossing The Road

The First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety, has opened in Moscow with some fascinating facts.

• 1.27 million people are killed worldwide in traffic accidents ever year
  

  Pedestrians face traffic in all directions

• Half of them are not in cars, but are pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists
• 50 million people are severely injured each year
• More people are dying in road accidents worldwide than die of malaria or diabetes
• At this rate, by 2020 road accidents will become the third most serious threat to human health.
• The Asia-Pacific region accounts for about 60% of global road deaths, despite having only 16% of the world’s vehicles
• Road injuries kill more children aged 5 to 14 in poor countries than malaria or AIDS
• They are the single biggest killer of 15- to 29-year-olds
• The threats associated with roads massively outweigh those posed by terrorism, which the media gets hysterical about
• Each day, road accidents cause a loss of life equivalent to 10 jumbo jet crashes
• The death rate on Russia’s roads is more than 25 fatalities per 100,000, about double the U.S. rate of 13.9 and five times higher than in Britain, which has 5.4 and one of the best safety records in Europe
• Half of only 57 per cent of countries have laws that require all car occupants to wear seat-belts, and less than one third meet basic criteria for reducing speed in urban areas.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his opening speech, has urged greater efforts to better protect the millions upon millions who travel the world’s roads every day saying that road traffic deaths and injuries are preventable.”

Former NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson, chairman of the Commission, says the Moscow summit provides an opportunity to rethink the links between transport policy and development.

“We need to reject the business model that measures a nation’s economic progress in terms of kilometers of roads while turning a blind eye to avoidable human suffering. And we need to put road safety at the heart of the international development agenda.”

The Moscow summit could chart a new course by pressing the United Nations to adopt a Decade of Action for Road Safety aiming to halve the projected increase in the forecast level of road fatalities by 2020. The goal could save 5 million lives and prevent 50 million serious injuries.

The chairman continued: “There is something deeply disturbing about the international response to road traffic injuries. When lives are threatened by the H1NI flu pandemic, governments issue crisis prevention policies — and rightly so. Yet an epidemic that sends a quarter of a million young people to an early grave each year barely registers on the radar screen of world leaders.”