The European Road Safety Charter

Objectives

The European Road Safety Charter is a tool that enables the integration of all sectors of society, large or small, in the quest to improve road safety in Europe.  By 2010, the number of deaths on our roads must be halved, and this objective can be achieved by working together.

During the nineties, statistics showed an easing off in the reduction of the number of people killed on roads in Europe; indeed, although between 1990 and 1995 this reduction in the number of fatalities rose to 18%, the second half of the decade showed a figure of only 11%.  This extremely unsatisfactory development led the European Commission to intervene further in the field of road safety. It therefore defined an objective that was as precise as it was ambitious and encouraged people to take action for the next decade: that of reducing by half the number of road accident victims in the European Union.  The Commission announced this objective in 2001 in its White Paper on “European Transport Policy for 2010: Time to Decide”. Two years later saw the appearance of the European Road Safety Action Programme – Halving the Number of Road Accident Victims in the European Union by 2010: a Shared Responsibility.  This programme contains some sixty actions to be carried out in the different fields, which include vehicle technology, user behaviour and road infrastructure. Whilst the Action Programme lists the specific actions in the sphere of responsibility of the European Union and most of the Member States have adopted their own programmes, there are no similar plans for civil society; defining these plans is a task for which society is directly responsible.  And to encourage the actors of civil society to assume their responsibility, the European Commission presented the European Road Safety Charter.  The Charter provides the tool as well as the forum for this action, which means that the European Action Programme and the European Charter share the same objective.

Main achievements

The main aim of the Charter is to ensure that society becomes aware that approximately 44,000 deaths on European roads each year is the symptom of a serious illness that is directly linked to our travel needs, our desires in terms of mobility and, above all, the way in which we act upon this mobility (for example, speeding, drink-driving, not wearing seatbelts).  There are far too few people who know that the lack of road safety is the first cause of death among people under the age of 45.  Raising public awareness about the problem of the lack of road safety clearly falls short of the reality of its impact on our daily life.

The European Road Safety Charter and the Action Programme with the common objective should then show that the deaths that occur on the roads are not a matter of fate, but the result of a situation with known causes that can therefore be changed. Furthermore, the European Commission hopes that a large number of different actors will sign the European Road Safety Charter with the intention of taking on new and creative commitments that will be fulfilled and assessed and then published on the Charter website.  The commitments and experiences, along with their execution, will be accessible to the public so that other people may be inspired and will undertake to carry out similar, or even innovative, actions.  In such a way, it will be possible to create, following the example of a database, a database of best practices in the different fields of road safety, as well as shared interest networks.  

Coordinator :

PAU Education
C/ Muntaner 262, 3
08021 Barcelona
Phone: +34 933 670 426
Fax: +34 932 006 864
 

Contact person:

Email : stine.jensen@paueducation.com