“If you read any newspaper in India, across Africa or southeast Asia, you regularly see big stories about crashes involving multiple casualties,” said Saul Billingsley, director of the FIA Foundation, a global road safety charity. “There’s awareness that these things are happening [in developing countries], but not an awareness of how to deal with it.”
About 90 percent of the 1.2 million deaths caused by road crashes each year occur in developing countries.
Road injuries are the leading cause of death among people aged between 15 and 29, and the ninth-leading cause of death overall, according to the WHO.
Illustration: Tania Chou
These are big numbers, and the issue goes beyond the immediate impact. Every year, 1 million children are either killed or seriously injured in road crashes and miss out on an education.
If a parent is injured or killed, children often have to drop out of school to look after them or find a way to earn money, and there is a strain on health systems that are already under pressure, Billingsley said.
Globally, the development sector has been slow to recognize road safety as an issue.
“I’ve always described it as a hidden epidemic,” said Kevin Watkins, executive director of the Overseas Development Institute. “If you ask people working in international development or infrastructure planning whether they’re aware of the level of road traffic injuries and the associated social and economic costs, there is an incredibly low level of awareness.”
Billingsley blamed this on road safety not being among the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Research into road safety as a development issue fell away from the end of the 1990s, as governments, nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies concentrated on the eight key areas of the MDGs, he said.
However, the dawn of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) means that awareness of the issue now needs to grow fast. One of the many ambitious targets is to halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2020.
How can such a huge problem be halved in such a short amount of time?
A group of organizations has been quietly campaigning on road safety over the past 10 years.
The campaign, coordinated by the foundation, worked to establish the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 and was instrumental in getting the issue included in the SDGs.
Two high-level ministerial conferences — in Russia in 2009 and Brazil last year — also proved to be “momentum changers” in getting road safety onto the international agenda.
Over the past few years, this group of organizations has built a rich body of evidence that shows exactly what can be done by different stakeholders to tackle deadly road traffic incidents.
For governments — both national and municipal — the need is to pass stringent laws, such as those to reduce speed limits and enforce helmet-wearing.
For example, in Vietnam, helmet-wearing increased from 40 percent to 95 percent within days of the government passing a requirement for motorcycle users to wear one, said Kelly Henning, director of public health programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has committed US$259 million to improve road safety.
Cambodia, too, is becoming a success story.
Helmet-wearing among motorcycle riders has increased from 15 percent to 30 percent overall, and from 0 percent to 28 percent among children, since a new traffic safety law came into force at the start of this year.
Sao Paulo, Brazil’s Life Protection Program — which introduced diagonal crossings, pedestrian-only zones and significant speed limit reductions — contributed to a 20.6 percent reduction in traffic fatalities in the city between 2014 and last year.
On two of the city’s busiest highways — Marginal Tiete and Pinheiros — the speed limit was reduced from 90kph to 70kph for light vehicles and from 70kph to 60kph for heavy vehicles. The city also implemented 11 “Areas 40” to reduce the speed limit to 40kph in areas with high pedestrian and commercial activity.
For passengers, evidence shows that speaking up about bad driving can help make roads safe.
From 2007 to 2013, projects in Kenya placed stickers in the back of long-distance minibuses featuring messages such as: “Don’t let a reckless driver get away with murder.”
After the first pilot (“Heckle and Chide”) ended, insurance companies released copies of their records for the previous three years so that researchers could study the impact of the project.
“The vehicles we targeted with stickers were half as likely to have an accident than the ones that were not targeted,” said Billy Jack, one of the researchers from Georgetown University who ran the study. “We also found that the number of accidents involving death or injury was reduced by 60 percent.”
A second study, Zusha — Swahili for “protest” — found a between 25 and 35 percent reduction in accidents.
Researchers now plan to increase use of the stickers across Kenya and to introduce the scheme in Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda.
Car manufacturers also have a role in improving safety. They are required to meet seven minimum recommended standards set by the UN in April.
“At the moment, unfortunately, most of the major manufacturers have a policy of producing vehicles with a far lower safety standard for emerging markets,” Watkins said. “These vehicles are far more likely to result in death and injury and, to my mind, that is a dereliction of corporate responsibility.”
The foundation is supporting the Global New Car Assessment Program to crash-test cars in Latin America, India and southeast Asia and publish the results.
Billingsley hopes it will encourage manufacturers to improve the quality of their vehicles.
Donors, too, can be champions for this issue by only financing projects that meet certain safety standards.
“If the board of the World Bank were to say: ‘We’re not going to sign off on any projects that don’t meet a minimum safety standard for road infrastructure,’ that would send a very clear incentive down to project planners and governments seeking to borrow,” Watkins said. “I do think the World Bank has moved in a positive direction on this — they are ahead of the curve if you compare them with the African, Asian or Latin American development banks — but they need to move much further and much faster.”
With nongovernmental organizations, governments, the UN, researchers, car manufacturers and donors focusing their efforts, can global road deaths and injuries be cut by 50 percent by 2020?
“The target looks very daunting and it’s evident that business-as-usual trajectories would leave us a long way short of the target, but there’s such a big gap between what we can afford to do and what we’re currently doing,” Watkins said.
“It certainly concentrates the mind having a five-year target,” Billingsley said. “If it isn’t achieved in terms of total fatality numbers, it doesn’t mean it’s failed. The work we do towards trying to meet it will not be in vain.”
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
As Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party won by a landslide in Sunday’s parliamentary election, it is a good time to take another look at recent developments in the Maldivian foreign policy. While Muizzu has been promoting his “Maldives First” policy, the agenda seems to have lost sight of a number of factors. Contemporary Maldivian policy serves as a stark illustration of how a blend of missteps in public posturing, populist agendas and inattentive leadership can lead to diplomatic setbacks and damage a country’s long-term foreign policy priorities. Over the past few months, Maldivian foreign policy has entangled itself in playing
A group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers led by the party’s legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (?) are to visit Beijing for four days this week, but some have questioned the timing and purpose of the visit, which demonstrates the KMT caucus’ increasing arrogance. Fu on Wednesday last week confirmed that following an invitation by Beijing, he would lead a group of lawmakers to China from Thursday to Sunday to discuss tourism and agricultural exports, but he refused to say whether they would meet with Chinese officials. That the visit is taking place during the legislative session and in the aftermath