|
How do you teach 500 million people in 27 different countries to drive better? For the European Commission, this has been a challenge since 2001, when it first set an ambitious EU-wide target of halving the number of fatalities on Europe's roads by 2010 and laid down a blueprint in the 2003 Road Safety Action Programme.
Now, as the programme draws to a close, the Commission is learning the lessons of that decade. And in July, it is due to unveil the follow-up programme, which will also cover a ten-year period, from 2011 to 2020, and aims to maintain the momentum across Europe for improving road safety and driving down fatalities.
Indeed, the Commission is planning to be as least as bold in the next ten years as it was a decade ago: the new programme will aim to reduce the number of road deaths and serious injuries by 50% between 2010 and 2020. This goes even further than the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), which called for a 40% cut in road deaths over the ten years until 2020.
Given that the EU was unable to meet its target for the current programme that is an audacious move. Indeed, the EU’s Road Safety Action Programme has had mixed results: there are still about 35,000 road deaths a year in the EU. It’s a big improvement on the 54,000 in 2001, but it is not the halving the EU promised.
So, how will the programme work? It sets seven priorities:
- Education and training for road users, and higher standard of traffic education;
- Boosting cross border enforcement;
- Sharing best practices on road safety campaigns;
- Safer road infrastructure;
- Subsidiarity principle for speed and alcohol limits;
- Developing technologies such as ITS and eCall;
- Improving emergency services.
At the moment, we do not have much more detail on the priorities, but they appear to reflect the demands of safety campaigners like the ETSC, including prioritizing road safety measures like stricter laws, more stringent enforcement and educational campaigns, tackling the three main killers on the roads (speed, drink driving and failure to wear seatbelts) and setting targets for desirable compliance levels.
One of the key challenges of the new programme is how to address drink driving. Figures from the European Road Safety Observatory show that about 25% of all road fatalities in Europe – or 10,000 deaths - are alcohol related. Officials admit that have considered stronger EU-wide measures for drink driving: there was a chance of introducing a recommendation for member states on minimum safe levels of alcohol for drivers.
As a recommendation only - as opposed to a directive - any proposal would not be legally binding on member states, but it would still be seen as a significant move by the Commission towards introducing harmonized drink-drive laws in Europe. At present, minimum blood alcohol limits for drivers differs from one member state to another. The UK, for instance, has one of the highest in Europe while the Czech Republic and Scandinavian countries have among the lowest.
However, they are also aiming to tackle drink driving by technologies like the alcohol interlock ( “alcolock”), a device that will lock the ignition when it detects high alcohol levels. The Commission’s proposal will only be the first part of the legislative process. Once it is published, it passes to the other EU institutions: the European parliament will probably issue its opinion in the autumn, and EU transport ministers will still discuss it as well.
But we already have an indication that the EU’s road safety agenda will remain big and bold over the next decade.
|
