Michael Palin calls for a ‘Road Safety Decade’ 

Michael Palin campaigning with children in India

Michael Palin has seen too many casualties on the world’s roads and wants a ‘Decade of Action’ to tackle growing death rates, he said adding his support to the Make Roads Safe campaign.

Signing up to the campaign’s ‘Call for a Decade of Action for Road Safety’, the Monty Python star and BBC documentary maker said:

“I think to make road safety a priority as the Make Roads Safe campaign and others are doing is the only way forward. Anyone who has seen or had any experience of a child who has been disfigured, let alone killed, in an accident or seen anybody else damaged in an accident would obviously want this to happen.”

The writer, actor, comedian and travel broadcaster said that a similar initiative to the global effort to eliminate Malaria is now needed as road deaths kill on the same scale as the disease.

In an interview given to the Make Roads Safe campaign while filming his latest documentary marking the 20th anniversary of the BBC’s ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, Palin stressed the urgent need to address road safety.

“What I have noticed in just the 20 years that I have been travelling is the enormous growth in the numbers of cars. I have found everywhere we’ve been that the motor car and the arrival of the motor car have made a great difference in a very short time. In every country people want to have access to cars, that’s just a fact of life. Every community anywhere in the world I’ve been to wants to have a car and the problem is that a lot of people who have cars are not aware of the damage they can do, the roads are not always made safe, it’s just ‘here you are, you’ve got your car, go for it.”

“We need a Decade of Action to educate people and to reduce the number of casualties and the number of deaths. We need a decade to deal with this problem, we have got the experience; we have got the technology; we have got the skills. We just need governments around the world to realise what they have got to do and to put in the money and the initiatives and to give their backing.”