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Road Safety Week is by far the most important seven days of the year for Brake, and I am delighted that TRL will be supporting us with this year’s campaign. It’s the first time that TRL has supported Road Safety Week in an official capacity, although they have been helping the charity for decades to achieve our shared ongoing mission to stop deaths and injuries on roads.
The theme of this year’s Road Safety Week is ‘Safe Roads for All’ because we wanted to emphasise how road safety really is a matter of life and death for everyone. Everybody should have the right to move around their communities and between places in safe and healthy ways. Yet all of us have the potential to be road crash victims – even if we think that it won’t happen to us, and many of us breathe poisonous air from traffic, causing more deaths and illness.
In the UK alone, there are more than 30 deaths from road crashes a week – equivalent to a Boeing 747 full of passengers falling from the sky every three months. Globally, there are a virtually incomprehensible 1.35 million road deaths a year, equivalent to about nine fully loaded jumbo jets crashing every day. If the aviation industry had a safety record like that, planes would be grounded. But when it comes to our roads, we somehow, as a society, tolerate the intolerable, or convince ourselves that road deaths and appalling injuries are an inevitable and acceptable trade-off against our need to go places; they are not.
This is why Road Safety Week matters; it gives us an opportunity to educate the public about road safety, to show that road deaths and injuries are not inevitable and to explain how we already have many evidence-based measures and solutions that can make our roads safer – if they are properly implemented.
When it comes to successful campaigns, what matters is evidence, evidence, evidence. This is why I am so happy to have TRL officially on board for this year’s Road Safety Week. Many of the improvements to road safety that we have seen in recent decades have been made precisely because they were backed up by scientific evidence provided by bodies such as TRL. Whether it was seatbelts, child seats, breathalysers or reduced speed limits in built-up areas, all of these measures were introduced because of the huge body of scientific evidence showing that they were effective in saving lives.
As well as individual road-safety measures, Brake is increasingly championing ‘Safe System’ solutions to road safety which begins by recognising that people will make mistakes on roads and that they are in danger of death or serious injury if they are involved in a crash. A Safe System considers what measures can be taken to mitigate human errors, prevent collision sand minimise harm caused if collisions do take place. This is achieved using strategies that include safe roads, safe speeds, safe vehicles, safe road users and effective post-crash care.
It’s an approach to road safety that was first adopted in Sweden and the Netherlands and is now considered international best practice by the World Health Organisation. This mirrors the view of Brake – that deaths and serious injuries on our roads are a preventable epidemic.
Brake and TRL clearly share many of the same goals in terms of creating transport systems that are safe, efficient, and designed with the needs of road users firmly at the forefront. I am confident that our two organisations can continue to work together – both for Road Safety Week and beyond – to make roads that are truly safe for all.
As part of TRL’s support for Road Safety Week, TRL will be posting a series of blogs written by our in-house experts, looking across the different themes Brake has identified as encapsulating the overall theme of ‘Safe Roads For All’. TRL’s experts have focused on some specific road users and topics within these themes and have tried to think about how all of this relates to a future in which transport is safe for everyone. The blogs cover active travel (Monday); how we teach children and young people about road safety (Tuesday); speed (Wednesday); road users with differing needs (including a focus on mental health and motorcyclists – Thursday); the future of driving (Friday); and the importance of learning from collisions (Sunday).
Check out TRL’s website and social channels for the latest blog.
Road Safety week runs from 14th to 20th November 2022, to find how out you can support Brake visit Road Safety Week | Brake
