A new report from the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP), Getting Organised to Make Roads Safe, urges member states to ‘get organised’ to stem the estimated EUR160 billion that annually bleeds away in road accidents — two per cent of Europe’s entire GDP.

Road casualties are a blight on European public health, with half million lives lost on the roads in the last 10 years. The report reveals high-risk routes across Europe where these deaths are concentrated. According to EuroRAP Chairman, John Dawson, “European citizens are being routinely killed and maimed on thousands of stretches of road, for want of simple, affordable road safety features such as clear road markings or safety fencing.”

Getting Organised to Make Roads Safe marks a move by EuroRAP from just measuring the safety of European roads to identifying the actions that authorities must take to manage roads to higher safety standards.

John Dawson adds “We must get organised to apply the cost-effective, life-saving measures that we know will quickly cut the appalling levels of human misery and financial loss. Getting the safety details right means roads that don’t make crashes more likely and that are more forgiving when crashes do happen. The EU target of a 50 per cent cut in roads deaths by 2010 will remain an aspiration unless authorities get organised to deliver systematic safety engineering programmes on the necessary scale.

“Making roads themselves safer provides some of the highest returns in terms of lives and money saved anywhere in the European economy. Look at Ireland, where in three years a systematic programme has cut national road deaths by 10 per cent. Small, well organised, targeted commitment not only saved lives and reduced crippling injury but delivered 1000 per cent return on investment.”

In welcoming EuroRAP’s report, EC Vice President in charge of Transport, Jacques Barrot, says, “Many lives could be saved and many accidents avoided if the existing road infrastructure was managed according to the best available know-how on safety engineering. The Commission has therefore adopted important new proposals for a draft Directive to improve the safety of major roads through infrastructure measures and better engineering.”

Getting Organised to Make Roads Safe includes:

• a Pan-European Risk Map showing progress in measuring the changing risk of death and serious injury faced by road users Europe’s major road network
• profiles of the 23 countries in the EuroRAP partnership , containing details of road accidents, road safety policy, results from national Risk Mapping work, how roads’ safety performance is being tracked and, in some countries, how roads are being star-rated in way similar to how cars are rated under the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroNCAP)

Download

Download Country Profiles and the pan-European Risk Map below from the EuroRAP website.