Chairman's Message

Getting Organised to Make Roads Safe

Photograph of John Dawson, Chairman of EuroRAP AISBL - European Road Assessment Programme

John Dawson
EuroRAP Chairman

In the last decade, 2 million Europeans have lost their lives or suffered crippling injury on our roads. Road casualties bleed away 2% of European GDP. Almost all of us know someone who has been killed in a road crash. In the last decade alone almost half a million Europeans have been killed on our roads, and every one has families and friends. This reservoir of human suffering rarely surfaces in the media - each personal tragedy is endured by the few involved.

Until EuroRAP, there had been no internationally recognised standards for governments, consumers or engineers to measure the safety of the roads we use every day. Roads were assumed to be safe if they met the engineering standards of the time when they were built.

As drivers, most of us fall well short of the standards expected of pilots. We need a road system designed for ordinary human beings who make mistakes. Those who willfully choose not to obey the rules of the road should expect to be punished. But everyday human driving errors should not be punished by a death sentence. Roads can be designed and laid out so that they do not invite mistakes and, when mistakes do happen, so that they do not result in the high energy collisions that kill.

Most serious accidents leading to death or serious injury have several contributory factors. Putting any one of them right can prevent a crash with serious consequences. EuroRAP has now revealed that the way roads are managed falls well short of what can be achieved. There are thousands of road sections across Europe where road-users are routinely maimed and killed for want of simple, affordable safety features. EuroRAP is highlighting hundreds of stretches of road across Europe where death and serious injury is routine - and avoidable with changes to road design and layout. It is also showing that leading authorities are making astonishingly effective life saving improvements, sometimes for little more than the cost of safety fencing or the paint required to improve road markings.

Yet investing in safer roads often requires little more than the organisation involved to install road markings or safety fencing. These programmes have some of the highest returns available anywhere in the European economy.

Now with wide support, the European Commission has published the first ever draft Directive to focus on the safety standards of our roads.

In a handful of years, EuroRAP has grown from a 4-country pilot to become a major force for change in over 20 countries. The programme is now being replicated in every part of the world.

John Dawson
Chairman