NO BREAKTHROUGH ON ROAD DEATHS FOR THE FOURTH CONSECUTIVE YEAR

19.6.18.: ETSC PIN Conference

Brussels – A new report by the European Transport Safety Council shows that road safety progress in the European Union has stagnated for the last four years. We agree with our colleagues from ETSC that now governments need strong political will, urgent measures and substantial investments in safe infrastructure to reduce the 500 deaths that occur on EU roads every single week. Thus the weekly number of road deaths in the EU is equivalent to two typical passenger airliners crashing and killing everyone on board.

ETSC latest Road Safety Performance Index (PIN) report shows that EU Member States are struggling to make a breakthrough: 25,250 people lost their lives on EU roads in 2017. Although road deaths declined by 2% last year, they have decreased by just 3% over four whole years since 2013. That’s by far not enough.
A positive development, in last month European Commission announcement of a major new package of road safety legislation that could prevent more than 2,000 deaths a year by the end of the next decade, and give us some hope for the future.

Antonio Avenoso, Executive Director of the European Transport Safety Council said:
“If two passenger planes fell out of the sky every week in Europe, the public and political response would be transformational. And improvements in aviation safety in Europe over the last fifty years have been just that. We now need a matching system-wide approach to road safety."

Download the report at etsc.eu/pin12

Among the main recommendations to EU institutions in this report FEVR especially welcomes within the context of the revision of Regulation 2009/661 (General Safety of Motor Vehicles), to mandate Event Data Recorders in all new vehicles and require the data to be made available for crash investigation.
The best results were achieved by Estonia with a 32% decrease, Luxembourg with 22%1, Norway with 21% and Slovenia with 20%. FEVR also welcomes ETSC´ s chapter related to “Post Crash Response”

Streamline the emergency response chain and increase the quality of trauma management in order to mitigate collision consequences more effectively. The EC should actively encourage Member States to develop effective post-collision care to ensure that all countries offer equally high standards of rescue, hospital care and long-time rehabilitation following a road collision. More should be done on tertiary safety enabling swift access to victims in case of a crash by providing information to rescue services on vehicle construction.
Adopt a new EU health strategy including road traffic injury prevention measures.

Jeannot Mersch, FEVR president said:
"Many serious injuries could be avoided by reducing speed, actions such as ISA, speed enforcement and infrastructure to reduce speed should all be prioritised, promote best practice in traffic calming measures in urban areas and introducing more 30km/h zones. These could all help to get a bit closer to the target set for 2020 and so giving some hope on our way to a future Vision Zero."