Eliminating Serious Injury and Death from Road Transport Is Not a Pipe Dream

Thankfully, the vast majority involves only property damage, but a small proportion results in disabling injury, and a smaller proportion still results in death. Though the latter proportions are small, the absolute number of disabling injuries and deaths is tragically large. Many tens of millions are seriously injured or disabled each year. Someone, somewhere in the world, dies about every 25 seconds as the result of a road crash.  

Every day in Australia around four people die, close to 50 are seriously injured, and some 500 family, friends, and work colleagues are directly affected as the impacts of these tragedies spread like ripples across a pond. 

How strange that we are willing to accept, with mind-numbing equanimity, such a level of human suffering while we simultaneously express outrage at the collateral damage that occurs in the current wars in the Middle East, and we express even 

Leonard Evans, in his 2004 book Traffic Safety, wrote In a typical month more Americans die in traffic than were killed by the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The aftermath of 9/11 has been a massive global investment in security systems. At the same time, traffic safety investment has remained pitifully small.  

Evans also noted Since the coming of the automobile in the early days of the twentieth century, more than three million Americans have been killed in traffic crashes, vastly more than the 650,000 American battle deaths in all wars, from the start of the revolutionary war in 1775 through the 2003 war in Iraq. He concluded that traffic safety is a grossly underestimated public health problem. 

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Eliminating Serious Injury and Death from Road Transport Is Not a Pipe Dream... 

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