27 March 2011

European Campaign for Safe Road Design

GEYC supports the European Campaign for Safe Road Design. This campaign is created in order to raise awareness and understanding of the need to invest in road system improvement. The goal e is to reduce road crashes, the most common incidents nowadays, ever more numerous than rail and air crashes. The idea of the campaign consists of the need of safe drivers, safe roads and safe vehicles.
It can save hundreds of thousands of lives. Despite the fact that this problem has a large area of coverage, the project takes into account only countries of the European Union.

The reasons of launching the campaign are:
• Half a million killed on EU roads in past decade
• Safe road design could cut annual road deaths and injuries by 50,000
• Road crashes cost annual €160bn (2 per cent of EU GDP)
• Europe's new 10-year plan must incorporate safe road design
• Europe-wide maps of risky roads published

KEY STATISTICS
• In the past 10 years 2 million people have been killed or suffered life changing injury in road crashes across Europe
• Road crashes bleed away €160 billion a year, equating to 2% of GDP
• Two-thirds of Europe's road deaths are concentrated on national and regional roads outside major towns
• Serious crashes can drop by more than half when roads are given a safety makeover
• The EC is starting its 10 yearly road safety review of options preventing further road casualties beyond 2010
• A formal safe road infrastructure could cut casualties by 50, 000 annually in less than a decade
• In the next decade we can save at least 0.5% of GDP - €50 billion...
• ...saving at least 300 deaths and serios injuries every day
• Road deaths are the leading cause of death amongst healthy young adults

Campaign's YouTube channel features the campaign video in a number of European languages.