Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Road safety - public health and injury prevention

Road safety aims to reduce the harm (deaths, injuries, and property damage) resulting from crashes of road vehicles. Harm from road traffic crashes is greater than that from all other transportation modes (air, sea, space, off-terrain, etc.) combined.

Road safety deals exclusively with road traffic crashes – how to reduce their number and their consequences. A road traffic crash is an event involving a road vehicle that results in harm. For reasons of clear data collection, only harm involving a road vehicle is included. A person tripping with fatal consequences on a public road is not included as a road-traffic fatality. To be counted a pedestrian fatality, the victim must be struck by a road vehicle.

Road traffic crashes are one of the world’s largest public health and injury prevention problems. The problem is all the more acute because the victims are overwhelmingly healthy prior to their crashes. According to the World Health Organization more than a million people are killed on the world’s roads each year.

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