Road Carnage: The Silent Global Epidemic We Must Stop

Guest Contributor: Michael Dreznes

How can we justify our lack of global effort to defeat what has been called “the second worst epidemic in mankind’s history?”

An Alarming Epidemic

In the Plague of Justinian in 541 and 542 AD, approximately 100,000,000 people died, making this event recognized as the worst epidemic in history.  The second worst epidemic was the Black Plague in 1346 to 1350 with 50,000,000 people dying, followed by the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in which approximately 40,000,000 people died between 1960 and today.

According to the World Health Organization, every year, approximately 1,350,000 people die on the roads around the world.  (Close to 40,000 of those fatalities occur on U.S. roads) 

Assuming a conservative estimate of 1,000,000 deaths on the world’s roads each year since 1960, this would mean almost 60,000,000 people have died on our roads in the past 60 years, making Road Carnage statistically the second worst epidemic in history, surpassing the Black Plague!  In addition, another 20 to 50 million people are seriously injured each year on our roads.

The alarming part of this story is that the 1,350,000 death total is more than 7% higher than the 1,260,000 people who were dying on our roads in 2010, when the Decade of Action was started. (In the United States, approximately 33,000 people died in 2010. This means the 2017 fatality number was about 20% higher in the United States!)

The Decade of Action

The Decade of Action was designed to implement strategies to reduce fatalities on the roads.  We are going in the wrong direction, and not enough effort is being made to reduce these fatalities on our roads.  Like Einstein so correctly stated, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  We MUST stop the insanity by doing something different starting today, or we face the unfortunate fate of being a part of the generations that allowed road fatalities to become the worst epidemic in mankind’s history.

What are we doing differently since 2010?  Are we aware of the problem?  Are we aware of the “vaccines” that are available right now to reduce the road carnage?

Ignoring the Problem of Road Carnage

You would think that with the advancements in vehicle safety, road safety concepts and products, driver education, and more, we would see fatalities dropping every year.  It is interesting that about 92% of the fatalities occur on lower and middle income countries.  These countries are not aware of many of the vehicle safety or road safety advancements.  This is exactly what IRF Global is trying to overcome.  It is VERY frustrating to tell road authorities about safety advancements only to see them totally disregard what you tell them.

Too many countries have a speed management problem. A pedestrian impacted by a vehicle traveling at 20 mph only has about a 10% chance of dying.  That same pedestrian impacted by a vehicle traveling at 40 mph has about a 90% chance of dying! However, we have pedestrians walking right next to roads with 45 mph speed limits. We must follow the example of London and Melbourne by implementing the “Safe System Approach” and reduce the speed limit within the city limits where pedestrians are located to 20 mph (30 km/h); Melbourne and London are two of the safest cities in the world for traffic fatalities. However implementing a 20 mph (30 km/h) speed limit in a city would be political suicide in many countries!

The road industry is the only industry in the world where people are willing to sacrifice health and safety for speed and mobility. Imagine going to a doctor and telling the doctor that you have a concept or a device that will reduce the operating time for an open heart surgery procedure from six hours to four hours. The downside is that there is a 40% greater chance that the patient would die! You would get thrown out of the building! The road industry understands the facts and yet continues to side with the speed and mobility supporters.

Context sensitive design, such as planting trees in medians, is another issue where the architects have a louder voice than the safety specialists.  Unfortunately in many cases there are no road safety specialists at the table. The proper utilization of an Road Safety Audit can help to make everyone aware of the road safety considerations.

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“Sometimes the living have to close the eyes of the dead, and sometimes the dead open the eyes of the living.”

Sibusiso Ndeble, South Africa Minister of Transport; Spoken at a UN Decade of Action Collaboration meeting regarding the death of Nelson Mandella’s great granddaughter Zenani, in 2010 when she was hit by a drunk driver.

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No More Excuses

If something is important to you, you will FIND A WAY.  If it is not important to you, you will find an “EXCUSE.”  No more EXCUSES! Everyone needs to make the effort to learn about the road safety vaccines, either on-line, in magazines, in exhibitions, in conferences or in training courses, and then use this knowledge to stop our road carnage.

Our eyes MUST be opened by now, and now we must act aggressively to make a difference.   Act today to make a difference tomorrow.  We must make our roads “Safe,” and not just “Safer,” for All Road Users.

There are some things in life that we do not want to be known as being number one.  Let’s do what we need to do to leave that epidemic distinction to the Plague of Justinian.

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Michael Dreznes is the Executive Vice President at IRF Global with global leadership on training, policy and capacity-building activities across IRF’s road safety programs. He is the Co-Chairman of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration Pillar 2 ‘Safer Roads and Mobility.’ The Pillar 2 Project Group goal is to provide direction and guidance for road authorities to meet the challenge of the Decade of Action to reduce global road fatalities by 2020.