Dr Jeffrey Runge, Administrator of the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) describes the urgent need to tackle road traffic injuries around the world in an interview with the FIA Foundation.
‘This is not a problem that’s going to be solved by governments alone, this is a problem that belongs to society, to people in society. This is a problem that is actually being worked on very actively by business, by auto makers, by the FIA Foundation who stepped up to the plate to try to broker all the people working on this issue at the same time. Now we are on the cusp of turning the corner on this thing. But the time is now. If we don’t get hold of this very soon we are going to see the cost of this paid in human life’.
‘The loss of one life is tragic. As a physician who practiced in a trauma centre for 20 years I can tell you that every trip down the hall to the family room to talk to parents, to tell them their teenager is not going to come home, or a child that their dad or mom is not going to come home, is the most gut wrenching exercise you can go through, except to experience the loss yourself. This happens in the US over 42,000 times a year, and when you consider it happens 1.2 million times worldwide it is a tragedy that is almost beyond comprehension’.
‘We talk a lot about numbers, but really we are talking about lives. And those are just the fatalities that are relatively easy to count. In the US we experience around 3 million injuries a year. Many of those are serious, many of those involve brain injuries, or even concussion, where there are behavioural problems, or inability to compute simple math, sleep disturbances, increases in alcohol abuse – just from the injuries. So if you think about 35 million more injuries worldwide it is a health problem of incomprehensible size’.
‘The beauty of where we are in history right now is that the more developed countries that have been heavily motorised for a long time have solved many of the problems that have existed. If you look at where the US or Western Europe was in the late 1940’s or early 50’s, with vehicles that were not built for safety and roads that were not built for safety, we’ve moved beyond that and we know what the policies are that have led to a drastic decline in motor vehicles’ crash fatality rates’.
‘With developing countries and those countries that are becoming more heavily motorised now there’s a lot of low lying fruit and they need not repeat the mistakes that we made 40 or 50 years ago. There is an opportunity now to speed up that evolution by adopting practices that we know work: vehicle safety regulation; use of safety belts; sober driving; speed control and enforcement; public information and education; engineering of safer roads – those are all elements that we know work. We have also had the experience of depending upon a central agency within government to be the broker of these best practices, and through some mechanism, whether it is insurance tax in Switzerland or whether it is fuel tax in the United States, there is a funding stream there for these programs to be implemented and regulation then to be enforced’.
‘If you are looking for a economic argument [for road safety measures] there is a very easy one to make. Look at safety belts. In the US where safety belt use is 80% now, we still estimate that it costs our economy about $18 billion a year for people who don’t wear safety belts, largely in terms of medical costs, loss of productivity and consequent overheads. This is unconscionable and ridiculous and there is a societal need to get this taken care of. So when we proposed to increase safety belt use over the last three and a half years, and we’ve done quite well, we’ve increased belt use from 71% when I took office to 80% today, every single percentage point gives us 270 lives, saves 4200 serious injuries and saves about $800 million in economic costs’.
‘Look at the return on investment from a safety programme. If we can spend $10 million on our ‘Click it or ticket’ safety belt programme, well that resulted in an increase in the last two years of 5 percentage points [in seat belt compliance]. That’s about $4 billion return on investment. Pretty good investment!’
‘If you are interested in the human side of things, what is more important to a voter, a mother who is worried about the safety of her family? I am convinced that people choose leaders on self interest, and if they perceive correctly, that one of the biggest threats to the life of their children is motor vehicle crashes they will select leaders that are responsive to that need’.
‘Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the US over the age of two and for adults until age 35. This can’t be ignored as a public health problem and there are counter measures that can deal with this’.
Dr Runge was talking to the FIA Foundation during the recent WHO and UNECE road global safety coordination meetings held at the UN in Geneva.