US government agencies have discussed cooperation on global road safety in a workshop organised by the US National Academies.
Representatives of NHTSA and the Department of Transportation, USAID, the State Department, Centre for Disease Control (CDC), Health & Human Services Department, and the Departments of Defence and Commerce met in Washington D.C. to examine the potential for a collective response to the crisis of global road traffic injuries, which kill 1.2 million people a year. The meeting was also attended by the World Bank, PAHO, the FIA Foundation and a number of US academics and NGOs.
John Flaherty, Chief of Staff at the Department of Transportation, argued that road safety was a ‘fledgling issue on the scale of international issues’ and that the US response should emphasise ‘practical institutional efforts, a coalition that can survive’ changes in administration and shifting priorities. He said that it was important that the US should tackle global road safety, both for reasons of foreign policy, being ‘a good global neighbour’ and for issues of economic secutiry, but also because road traffic injuires are a major public health issue. ‘We have to convince developing countries that this is an issue of importance to them’. The US is indeed playing a leading role in global road safety. The US Secretary for Transportation, Mr Norman Mineta has taken a personal interest in the issue and represented the US at the UN General Assembly debate on road safety in April 2004. He has strongly supported US engagement in the issue, particularly through the international work of the US National Highway Safety Administration.
Tony Bliss, Lead Road Safety Specialist at the World Bank, pointed out that ‘the gap between the road safety rich and road safety poor is widening’, and underlined the importance of increasing resources and activity in middle and low income countries. Maryvonne Plaissis-Fraissard, Director of Infrastructure at the World Bank, presented the new Global Road Safety Facility, which aims to attract increased and new sources of funding for road safety projects. Saul Billingsley, from the FIA Foundation, argued that road safety should be seen as a mainstream development issue, essential to the success fo the Milennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the revived G8 agenda on infrastructure development.
The early results of an inventory of US Government activities in global road safety was presented, which showed that, with the exception of DoT and NHTSA, international road safety was mainly percieved as an issue of safety of American citizens abroad and very little funding was available. However, the recently passed SAFETEA-LU transportation act gave an explicit approval for NHTSA to be involved in global road safety activity. For the Defence Department, road crashes are the number one cause of non combat fatalities, although these mainly occur on US roads.
Harvey Fineburg, President of the US Institute of Medicine, described road traffic injuries as ‘a slowly unfolding catastrophe, an explosion in slow motion around the world’. He argued that the lack of interest or concern about the issue in Congress reflected public opinion, and advocacy was needed to raise public awareness about a ‘severe, even dominating, problem in the world today’. Meeting chairman, Mark Rosenburg, Director of the Taskforce for Child Survival, described the meeting as ‘a historic step…we are starting to act’.