Norman Mineta with FIA Foundation Director General David Ward
Former US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has joined the Commission for Global Road Safety and marked the occasion by hosting a high level global road safety briefing and dinner for policymakers and donors in Washington DC.
Secretary Mineta, a former Democratic Congressman who served in the cabinets of both President Clinton and President George W. Bush, urged participants at the dinner, which was hosted at the World Bank, to do more to support global road safety. “With 1.3 million deaths every year, road crashes are what I call our “epidemic on wheels.” Deaths on the world’s roads are accelerating at an alarming rate and it affects our health, our economies, and indeed, our very quality of life”, Mr Mineta said.
Participants at the dinner, organised by the Make Roads Safe campaign, included representatives of the Goldberg Foundation, Bertlesmann Foundation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Adventist Development Relief Agency (ADRA) and Safe Kids Worldwide. Officials from USAID, the State Department, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and from the US Congress and the World Bank also participated.
Secretary Mineta urged US policymakers to support the proposed Decade of Action for Road Safety.
“It is vital that the U.S. have high-level representation at the Moscow Ministerial and it is equally important that the U.S. urge the United Nations to support the Decade of Action. The bipartisan Congressional Global Road Safety Caucus has recently submitted a resolution calling for these very same goals. For the first time, many in the U.S. are seeing road safety for what it is – a development as well as a health and transportation issue”, Mr Mineta said.