Jean Todt urges for greater effort on road fatalities

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07.12.18

The latest statistics from a newly published World Health Organisation (WHO) report show that action taken has not been sufficient to curb global road fatalities.

According to the latest figures from the WHO’s Global Status Report on Road Safety, global road fatalities have increased to 1.35 million, with road traffic injuries being the first cause of death among children and young adults aged 5-29. The figures show that road safety remains a major public health issue, particularly in developing countries, where the average fatality rate sits at 27.5 per 100,000 population in low-income countries compared to 8.3 per 100,000 in high-income countries. Current efforts are therefore far from sufficient if global road safety targets are to be achieved, notably the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.6, which calls for a 50% reduction in the number of road traffic deaths by 2020.

Jean Todt has urged for greater effort to be taken to meet this challenge by saying, “In my capacity as UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for road safety and as FIA President, I call on all stakeholders to redouble their efforts to improve global road safety and stop this carnage on the roads”.

Safer roads are a priority of the FIA. In 2017, the FIA launched the #3500LIVES road safety awareness campaign with the support JCDecaux, the number one outdoor advertising company worldwide. The #3500LIVES campaign features 15 world famous ambassadors from the worlds of entertainment (Michael Fassbender, Patrick Dempsey, Pharrell Williams and Michelle Yeoh), motor racing (Fernando Alonso, Marc Márquez, Felipe Massa and Nico Rosberg), sport (Yohan Blake, Haile Gebrselassie, Antoine Griezmann, Vanessa Low, Rafael Nadal and Wayde van Niekerk), and politics (Anne Hidalgo). It encourages all road users to adopt simple, easily applicable and efficient road safety rules, the FIA’s Golden Rules for Road Safety. The campaign has now been translated into more than 30 languages and displayed in over 1,100 cities in approximately 80 countries around the world.

In 2015, the FIA established the High Level Panel for Road Safety, an unprecedented coalition of leaders from the global business community, international institutions and NGOs with the aim to engage both the public and private sectors to raise funding and political awareness in response to the road safety crisis. It works to remobilise support for the goals of the Decade of Action and for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, both of which have committed governments to halving road traffic fatalities by 2020.

The WHO’s 2018 Global Status Report can be found here