Michael Palin adds his name to the Decade of Action for Road Safety
“Well it wasn’t meant to happen – I wasn’t intending to do what has turned out to be seven TV travel series covering every continent in the world. It all started because I was asked to be the victim in Around the World in Eighty Days. Would I try and go around the world using Jules Verne’s route – taking no planes, staying on the surface of the planet and seeing if we could still do in 1988 what he wrote about it in 1888 and seeing if we could do it faster? I accepted that challenge and it worked out very well and as a result the BBC were very keen for me to travel somewhere else and so I said ‘ Oh alright, one more and then I will go back to all the nefarious things I do like acting and writing’.
We did North Pole and South Pole and by this time I realised that I loved travelling and I was very curious about the world – there was a lot I wanted to see and the BBC were a pretty good travel agent, gave us the money and we went around, a very convivial group of people, and made these programmes and they weren’t judgmental programmes, they were really about just opening windows so you could see people all over the world, and as I say we have done seven series now in every continent.
I have travelled many, many roads, especially going down through Africa where there really was no alternative, and we tried as much as possible to stay on the surface and not use planes because we wanted to stay in touch with the people we met and see the landscape. So there have been an awful lot of roads all over the world - down through Africa, right up through South America into North America: roads of all kinds, shapes and sizes.
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, just ‘here you are you’ve got your car, go for it.’
A lot of people have access to cars without really understanding the responsibilities of a driver. Very often what I’ve seen is bad driving due to the fact that people just think ‘hey we’ve got a car, we have this possession’, it’s kind of like a virility symbol and ‘we are now the top person’ and they forget that people are crossing the road, that other people are on the road, people that don’t have cars, who are pedestrians who have to get across the road, that there is no way for them to get across the road, there is no proper crossing, there’s no specially designated area, they just have to run in between the traffic. They forget that people that don’t have cars are just as important as the people that do.
And people can drive very aggressively. I’ve seen a lot of that and also I’ve seen ridiculous things that could have been avoided. I remember we were filming in Africa and we were overtaken by a pick-up truck which had about 20 people just standing in the back, hanging on to each other, some of them holding on to the side, a totally unsuitable form of transport. They raced past us and about 2 hours later we went past and there had been an accident, it had toppled over and there was no chance of people not being injured. And in fact a couple of them had been killed. Someone needed to be educated that you don’t take people around standing in the back of trucks!
I think it is something that people are just beginning to realise - and this is something that has happened in the 20 years that I have been travelling - people are realising how they can organise road systems to build in safety. Now with things like traffic calming measures in very, very busy areas you can slow traffic down; you can have lights; you can have crossings; you can have areas where motorists are made aware that pedestrians are around.
There are organisations like Make Roads Safe who are advocating at the very highest level that road deaths are such a major killer now - I think it’s about the same number of people die as die from malaria. There’s been a great campaign to try and eliminate malaria, deaths have been reduced. I hope, and I’m sure that given the will, we can do the same for road deaths. It is totally unnecessary for these people to be killed. In many cases the expertise is there to build roads properly, the expertise is there to educate. Developing countries especially need to realise that a lot of young people and professional people and old people are all dying unnecessarily.
So I think to make road safety a priority as the Make Roads Safe campaign and others are doing is the only way forward. Everybody has to make the effort and 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. It just makes sense.
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.”
Michael Palin was a member of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’, and star of movies including ‘Life of Brian’, ‘A Fish Called Wanda’, ‘Time Bandits’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Fierce Creatures’. He has made several major travel documentaries for the BBC, including ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’, ‘Pole to Pole’, ‘Sahara’, ‘Himalaya’ and ‘New Europe’. He has been President of the UK Campaign for Better Transport since 1986.
He was talking to Richard Stanley in Mumbai, India.