This report aims to focus political and public attention on a global road traffic injury epidemic that claims the lives of more than 1.2 million people and injures around 50 million annually. Road traffic injuries are responsible for a global health burden similar to malaria and tuberculosis, and as with those diseases road crashes hit developing countries hardest. Yet while the fight against malaria and TB justifiably commands considerable funding and political and media attention, global road safety is seriously under-resourced in all these respects. Global road safety has barely featured on the international political agenda, yet it should be a priority for sustainable development. Our report sets out the arguments for including road safety in sustainable development strategies. It calls for high level political leadership on the issue and a significant scaling up of resources. Both are needed urgently. Dangerous roads have an impact on every development objective, including delivery of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), not least because of the immense economic and social cost of road crashes to low and middle income countries. The importance of road infrastructure to the MDGs has been highlighted by the G8, which endorsed a significant increase in road infrastructure funding at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit. However, the vital need to integrate road safety into this investment in new roads has not yet been recognised. To achieve this the Commission for Global Road Safety recommends that all donor supported road projects in developing countries should include a minimum 10% road safety component, to ensure roads are designed with safety in mind and that effective engineering, enforcement and education measures are combined together to promote injury prevention High income countries have learnt through painful experience that it is possible to reduce road casualties even as traffic increases. Now the challenge is to transfer and implement this knowledge into low and middle income countries. This will only succeed and be sustainable if these countries have the political will and technical capacity to lead their own road safety strategies and set their own targets. The Commission for Global Road Safety recommends that donor governments and private sector donors should together fund a ten year, $300 million Action Plan for global road safety to catalyse this development of national road safety capacity in low and middle income countries. This in turn will equip countries to put in place effective governance structures and road injury prevention strategies and to unlock larger scale funding for road safety from the development banks. In 2005 millions of people, and the leaders of the G8, responded to the call to Make Poverty History. A great deal was achieved. But - knowing that road traffic crashes cost at least $64.5 billion a year to low and middle income countries - we can see that many of the gains for development won in 2005 will be at risk if action is not taken to reverse the rising toll of road traffic death and injury. Every day 3000 people are killed in crashes on unsafe roads. We know that many of these deaths are preventable. That is why we must act together now to Make Roads Safe. (Author/publisher)
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