On 2 June 2003, the European Commission adopted its 3rd Road Safety Action Programme (2003-2010) “Halving the number of road accident victims in the European Union by 2010: A shared responsibility”. The prime purpose of this plan is to present the action that the Commission seeks to undertake in order to meet its ambitious target of halving the number of road accidents victims in the European Union by 2010. Extending the scope and duration of the two first Road Safety Action Programmes and acknowledging other crucial EU road safety dossiers such as the Communication on Priorities in EU Road Safety (COM(2000) 125), the 3rd Action Programme provides a unique opportunity for setting out a comprehensive long-term strategy guided by a numerical target. It is important to notice that road crashes in the EU each year: Kill almost 39,000 EU citizens; Kill around 110 persons every day: the equivalent of a medium-sized plane accident with no survivors; Cause more than 3 million injuries when under-reporting is taken into account; Cost around 180 billion € - around twice the total EU budget for all activity - more than pollution, congestion, cancer and heart disease. In view of these facts and the societal challenge to reduce injury risk and road deaths, ETSC clearly welcomes the timely, although delayed, adoption by the European Commission of its very ambitious 3rd Road Safety Action Programme (RSAP). As Europe’s sole NGO dedicated to improving transport safety across all member states and across all transport user groups, ETSC generally endorses the approach taken and the measures proposed by the Commission. In total, the plan represents a well-equipped tool box of actions to improve the level of safety on roads across Europe. But ETSC calls for a more urgent and robust approach by the EU and Member States to the use of these tools. As the plan suggests, and as ETSC has been arguing in the past, preventing road death and disabling injury requires a traffic system that is better adapted to the needs, errors and physical vulnerabilities of its users rather than one which expects users to cope with increasingly demanding conditions. Consequently, our response to the 3rd RSAP stresses a better adaptation of all elements of the transport system to the needs of all transport users in all EU countries. ETSC expects from a long-term road safety plan that it makes a tangible and of course measurable, contribution towards reduced road risk in an enlarged Europe by providing for a fairer distribution of safety across the European Union at the highest practicable level - that is by harmonising upwards. Against this background, ETSC strongly supports the approach taken by the European Commission emphasising the need for “shared responsibilities” in European road safety policies. The EU and each current and future Member State should continually and robustly challenge society’s complacency about the level of risk in using the roads by adopting or further developing road safety strategies which evoke and channel coherent and effective action by all those stakeholders within and outside government who can contribute to reducing death and injury on the roads. (Author/publisher) See also C 25510 and C 25511 fo.
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