European Clubs Call for Decade of Road Safety Action

Publication date: 14 January 2010

The European Union in 2001 set itself a tremendously ambitious objective in committing to halve the number of road fatalities by the year 2010. This target – already ambitious for EU 15 – was kept following the enlargement to 25 Member States in 2004 and 27 in 2007. While this goal was unlikely to be met in the enlarged Europe overall, it contributed to noticeable improvements in road safety and persuaded the new Member States to ambitiously enhance their national road safety programmes.

Indeed, and in spite of increasing car mobility, fatalities have significantly decreased in a large majority of Member States. In 2008, the decrease of road fatalities amounts to 35% in the EU 15, even if the overall decrease in the EU 27 amounts to 27%, compared to 2001.

While setting a reduction target for road accident fatalities, the European Union did not set such a target for severely injured road users. Between 2001 and 2008, the number of severely injured road users decreased by a more moderate 18% in the EU 27.

New Challenges Ahead

A lot remains to be done to improve road safety in Europe. If the global trend shows a clear decline in the number of fatalities and serious injuries, some road users such as motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians are for instance still disproportionately at risk.

Also societal changes need to be taken into account in future road safety strategies. The fact that we live longer and healthier lives brings forward a number of challenges and opportunities. The specific needs of the increasing share of older citizens in traffic will need to be taken account of in future road safety policy.

Clubs: A Wealth of Knowledge and Expertise

The improvement of road safety is one of the highest priorities of the motoring and touring clubs members of the FIA. All over Europe they carry out vehicle and safety equipment consumer tests, offer driver training, run seat belt wearing campaigns and assess the safety of mobility infrastructure. Through a varied number of initiatives and means to raise public attention they add-up an impressive power to change the way road users behave, mobility infrastructures are conceived and road vehicles are build. Through reaching out to 35 million affiliated member motorists they form a unique influential player in the field of road safety.

It is an undeniable fact that motoring and touring clubs are key players in the field of road safety. Their expertise in the areas of road user behaviour, the conception of safe vehicles and safe design of infrastructure is widely recognised and significantly contributes to making roads safer. Club campaigns contribute to raising citizens’ awareness on road safety challenges and their various assessments and benchmarking programmes participate to reaching the targets set at EU level.

Through initiating testing and benchmarking programmes such as the European New Car Assessment Programme, the EuroTest programme, the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP) and the European Tunnel Assessment Programme (EuroTAP) as well as numerous national schemes FIA member clubs have contributed to saving many lives. The positive role of such programmes is widely acknowledged as it successfully demonstrates that road safety improvements can be induced, even in the absence of legislation. Most European FIA Clubs also signed the European Road Safety Charter, thus showing their commitment to support the European initiative through awareness-raising and education in their countries.

A European Decade of Action on Road Safety

While clubs play an important role in improving road safety at national level the FIA European Bureau has been working in 2009 on developing a consolidated European strategy about the role that the European Union can play at supranational level to support and complement its member states efforts.

The result is a forward looking manifesto adopted by the European FIA clubs at the end of November. It pretends to give FIA clubs’ vision of the objectives towards which the European Union and its Member States should strive towards in the field of road safety in the coming decade as well as the most important actions that the European Union should take, both through policy and supportive activities.

FIA Eurocouncil’s “Roadmap to Road Safety 2020” comes at a crucial moment of European decision making as the European Commission is about to start developing its strategy in the field of road safety for the coming ten years. The result will be EU’s fourth Road Safety Action Programme, a direction giving political declaration stating the objectives and needs for action during the coming decade.

The FIA European Bureau started working on this in November 2008 by holding a workshop with road safety experts of the European clubs. Under the proficient chairmanship of RACC’s Miquel Nadal, the group established the principal guidelines of the work to be accomplished. It was reviewed and completed in a second workshop in September 2009. The conclusions of the first workshop were adopted by the FIA Eurocouncil in the form of the Copenhagen Road Safety Declaration published in June. The declaration sets out the vision, beliefs and demands that FIA clubs in Europe view as critical in terms of future European road safety policy.

The “Roadmap to Road Safety 2020”, adopted by FIA’s Euroboard in November 2009, was presented to European Commission Vice-President Antonio Tajani (see picture), to the Commission’s services and to other road safety stakeholders during a European conference organised by the European Commission on the 20th of November. The conference concluded the consultation process leading up to the coming Action Programme. The FIA European Bureau also participated during the autumn 2009 to several expert workshop organised by the Commission’s services on issues like vulnerable road users, vehicle technologies, training and education, the monetary evaluation of road safety casualties and the reallocation of costs to society, the safety of rural roads and communication aspects.

Roadmap to Road Safety 2020

The “Roadmap to Road Safety 2020” outlines a series of guiding principles applicable to all the action fields within road safety policy. The policy document underlines that improvements in the field of road safety can best be achieved through a shared effort and a shared responsibility of the main stakeholders. The FIA moreover stresses that as a strong political will and leadership are necessary to bring forward drastic changes.

Furthermore, Clubs recommend to decision-makers at all governance levels, regional, national and European, to accompany short and long term legislative changes with massive information and educational campaigns. At the same time, the FIA calls for the involvement of authorities and personalities at the highest level. They should personally engage for ambitious road safety targets.

Based on the clubs’ extensive expertise the Eurocouncil’s roadmap outlines the key areas for road safety improvement – whilst bearing in mind that the challenges faced by the 27 Member States vary greatly. More specifically the document presents targets for each identified area and proposes means to achieve these goals by 2020.

The overall objective set by FIA clubs is to reduce by 40% road deaths by 2020. Broken down by road user categories we propose the following targets:

•    40% fatality reduction of car occupants
•    40% fatality reduction of children as car occupants
•    30% reduction of severely injured car occupants
•    50% fatality reduction of accidents with HDV involvement
•    40% reduction of the number of PTW rider fatalities and severely injured
•    35% fatality reduction of pedestrians and cyclists

The risk of being killed on the roads significantly differs throughout the European Union. In 2008, the risk rate of high risk countries was up to four times that of low risk countries. Taking into account the different road safety risk rates, the manifesto proposes differentiated fatality reduction targets for 2020 aiming at a convergence of road safety in Europe:

•     50% fatality reduction target for countries whose risk rate is clearly more than 25 percentage points above the EU average
•     35% fatality reduction target for countries whose risk rate is in the range of 25 percentage points above or below the EU average
•     22% fatality reduction target for countries whose risk rate is clearly more than 25 percentage points below the EU average

The second part of the “Roadmap to Road Safety 2020” addresses a series of priority fields of action with detailed recommendations to the European Union.

•    The diversity of road safety statistics and collecting authorities in the EU makes it difficult to effectively define a targeted road safety policy. Therefore, the FIA clubs call upon the EU to further work on standard road safety data sets.
•    Road Vehicles, and especially passenger cars, steadily increased their safety performance in the past years. In order to pursue this positive trend, the FIA clubs call for a number of additional measures to reduce fatalities by 2020, based on the 2010 figures, by 40% for car occupants and for children as car occupants, fatalities with heavy duty vehicles (HDV) involvement by 50% and to reduce the number of severely injured persons by 30%.
•    Some road user such as motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians are still disproportionately at risk. Adopting a comprehensive framework regulation on type-approval of powered two- and three-wheelers and a second stage training for powered two wheelers (PTW) riders are actions that the FIA clubs would like to see implemented in view to reduce the number of riders killed and seriously injured by 40% by 2020. In order to reduce fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists by 35%, the FIA calls for increased traffic education.
•    Dangerous behaviours can be countered in many ways. In this regard, the FIA clubs believe that training and education from an early age would make a significant contribution toward improving road safety. While affordable advanced training opportunities should be available for all drivers, the FIA calls for the inclusion of defensive skills and mandatory second phase driver training in the Driving License directive.
•    Finally, the FIA calls upon the decision makers to dedicate more efforts to improving the road infrastructure. Specific attention should be paid to the design of new roads and to the most dangerous roads, such as rural roads. EU funding (TERN, Structural Fund) should be conditioned to the delivery of safe roads.

The FIA European Bureau also envisages setting up an annual reporting on the EU 27 accident data to be published in the clubs’ magazines. It should raise public awareness about the state of road safety in Europe, call for appropriate road safety standards and provide road users with tips and recommendations. The clubs are well placed to develop and put in place such a Europe wide road safety benchmarking programme assessing the safety potential and risk of each member state.

Download the “Roadmap to Road Safety 2020” here

Check our Road Safety policy paper here

Printed copies of the “Roadmap to Road Safety 2020” can be obtained from Olivier Lenz (o.lenz at fiabrussels.com).