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Call for a Decade of Action for Road Safety 2010-2020
Investment in systems of road injury data collection, adherence to common standards of reporting, especially the 30 day definition of a road traffic fatality, and data is made public.
To successfully implement the five pillar action plan, its intermediate targets and its ultimate objective of first stabilising and then reducing road traffic fatalities, will require a significant commitment in additional resources, particularly by developing countries themselves but also from the major multilateral and bilateral donors. In our 2006 Make Roads Safe report, the Commission advocated a $300 million ten-year global action plan (see Annex D). This estimation was based on an assessment of the scale of investment required to stimulate sustained capacity building in low and middle income countries and on their current absorption capacity to implement such programmes. The Commission believes that this plan for catalysing sustained national road safety activity and investment remains relevant to the new proposal for a Decade of Action. It would be implemented across the five pillars at two levels and include a number of components as follows: •
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Strategic Direction, consisting of global coordination and advocacy, and regional capacity building, plans and targets.
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Country Activity, consisting of assessment and research; institutional capacity building; pilot and demonstration projects; and post crash medical interventions.
The Commission’s action plan gives a crucial priority to invest in improved management systems for road injury prevention. An important consequence of this is the urgent need to strengthen professional skills in the management of road injury prevention programmes. This is especially important given the multi-sector nature of road safety, where responsibility is usually shared across a range of public authorities and stakeholders. Fortunately to help meet this need a draft standard for Road Traffic Safety Management Systems is now being prepared by the International Standards Organisation on the initiative of Sweden. It will develop a standardized management system based on the ‘safe systems approach’ combined with performance indicators to enable organisations with a responsibility for road management to share a common approach to road safety (see Feature 11). But to gain the most from the ISO standard once it is finalised there needs to be a substantial increased investment in capacity building in low and middle income countries to ensure that they can develop road injury prevention programmes relevant to the characteristics of their transport systems.
A DECADE OF ACTION FOR ROAD SAFETY