3 Putting people first: a post-2015 agenda for mobility
3 Putting people first: a post-2015 agenda for mobility
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SAFE R OADS FOR ALL
Safe and sustainable road transport, with ‘Safe System’ speed management at its heart, must be a post-2015 priority.
The current debate on a future framework for sustainable development provides an opportunity to integrate safe and sustainable transport within the next set of development goals, and to establish new partnerships for safe, healthy and clean transport and urban development strategies, with road safety and effective speed management at their heart, which put people first. At the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012, world leaders agreed to begin a process of designing new ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ to replace or renew the Millennium Development Goals which expire in 201521. For the first time at a UN ‘Earth Summit’, road safety and sustainable transportation were recognised in the communiqué as being an important part of the overall agenda to deliver social equity, health and urban development (see box 7). One of the most significant ‘Voluntary Commitments’ made at Rio+20 was a promise by the seven Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to deploy $175 billion in loans and grants to
sustainable transport projects over the next decade. The MDBs combined this commitment with a “call to the international community to embrace sustainable transport as a key sectoral focus of the new global agenda for sustainable development” and proposed “…that at least one of the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be formulated should be for sustainable transport”22. Recently, the President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, has reiterated the important platform provided by the Rio summit: “We recognise that the Rio+20 Conference has given us an opportunity to move the sustainable transport agenda forward, and road safety is an integral part of sustainable transport.” 23 There is indeed a strong case to be made for integrating road injury prevention into the SDGs as a subset of a wider Sustainable Transportation, Health and/or Urban Environment Goal. In a series of reports for the Make Roads Safe campaign on the impact of road traffic injuries on the MDGs and the case for including road safety within the post-2015 framework
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SAFE R OADS FOR ALL
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