As part of its ongoing mission to improve global road safety, UNECE, with the support of the International Road Transport Union (IRU), is developing a new tool to help governments design effective road safety plans that will save lives.
Keeping the roads safe for all road users is a global concern. Every year 1.25 million people are killed and around 50 million are injured in road traffic crashes, making it one of the most pressing health emergencies of our time. 500 children lose their lives on the road every day, with road traffic accidents representing the leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 29.
To combat this global crisis, UNECE is developing a tool to support knowledge-based transport policy decision-making to reduce the number of road casualties. The tool is called “Safe Future Inland Transport Systems (SafeFITS)”, and its primary objective is to assist governments and decision makers in assessing the results of policies and measures designed to improve road safety.
The SafeFITS model, which is entering its final phase of development, was presented to a panel of road safety experts and decision makers at a Roundtable in Geneva on Friday 30 June. Representatives of the road safety scientific community (including international organizations, academia, international financial institutions, etc.) provided feedback on SafeFITS and discussed road safety statistics and developments in modelling and measuring the impact of road safety policies. The feedback from the SafeFITS Roundtable will be used to improve the SafeFITS model and underline ways to improve the availability of robust and high quality road safety statistics and information.
To learn more about UNECE’s work to improve road safety, please visit: http://www.unece.org/mc/trans/theme_road_safety.html