Mr Daniel Cano, our Coordinator of the Region for the South American Region is to attend the World Urban Forum which will focus on Urban Equity in Development – Cities for Life. The forum will also discuss the pressing issues for the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Daniel will be attending and bringing his experience of road safety to the table equipped with knowledge of the international road safety crisis facing young people.

The World Urban Forum (WUF) is a non-legislative technical forum convened by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), hosted in a different city every two years, to examine the most pressing issues facing the world today in the area of human settlements, including rapid urbanization and its impact on cities, communities, economies, climate change and policies. It is the World’s Premier Conference on Cities.

The Forum gathers a wide range of experts from every walk of life. Participants at the Forum include, but are not limited to, national, regional and local governments, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, professionals, research institutions and academies, professionals, private sector, development finance institutions, foundations, media and United Nations organizations and other international agencies.

The WUF promotes the strong participation of Habitat Agenda partners and relevant international programmes, funds and agencies, thus ensuring their inclusion in the identification of new issues, the sharing of lessons learned and the exchange of best practices and good policies.

Our CORE Group Representative for South America, Mr Daniel Cano, a native of Colombia will be attending the conference and will represent YOURS. He told us,

On the matter of including Road Safety in the SDGs Daniel has alread talked with Paula Caballero, the leader of the post-2015 agenda on the Colombian ministry of foreign affairs and member of the High Level Panel for the Post-2015 agenda. She is considering including the four road safety targets in her proposal proposal.

Daniel will be reporting after the event with a written news report for the YOURS website and will give his take on his experience in the forum so stay tuned for that!

Read more about Mr Daniel Cano – Coordinator of the South American Region in the CORE Group

Safer and cleaner road transport is critical for achieving health and development goals around the world, according to a new report that—for the first time—assesses the global health loss from the combined impact of road injuries and pollution that can be attributed to motorised transport.

The report also highlights the growth in road deaths and injuries globally, and their substantial impacts on maternal and child health. The report confirms that road crashes result in 1.3 million deaths annually and it also highlights an annual total of 78.2 million nonfatal injuries warranting medical care. Road injury is also among the 10 leading causes of death in children ages 1 through 14, and a top five cause of death among women ages 15 to 29.

In his forward to the report, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim writes: “This is a powerful wake-up call… these alarming findings underscore the urgent need to spread improvements in transport pollution and safety across world regions. Road crashes cost an estimated 1 to 5 percent of GDP in developing countries, undermining efforts to reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity.”

“Transport for Health” calls for increased collaboration of the transport, health, and urban sectors, among others, to achieve sustainable transport and health policies, noting that the benefits of road safety and air quality improvements outweigh their costs, thus making a compelling case for urgent action.

“Health officials are typically viewed as the chief stewards of countries’ population health, but reducing the burden of disease from motor vehicles requires action from multiple sectors,” says Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “As demand for cars and roads increases, the transport sector plays a vital role in designing, building, and maintaining an infrastructure and regulatory system that encourage economic growth while minimising health loss.”

The report describes how the health burden associated with road transport spreads with economic growth and rapid motorisation, and notes that mitigating this risk requires a long-term investment strategy to build the capacity of national institutions so they can better manage safety and mobility performance.

FIA Foundation Director General Saul Billingsley was on the panel to launch the report. He said:

The report reveals the extent of the global health impact of road transport. It shows that:

• Road transport represents the eighth leading source of health loss globally. Injuries and pollution from vehicles contribute to six of the top 10 causes of death globally. The burden due to motorized road transport is growing. Over the last two decades, deaths due to road crashes grew by 46%. Deaths attributable to air pollution, to which motor vehicles are an important contributor, grew by 11%.
• Globally, road injury is the No.1 cause of death for boys and men aged 5-29 years; it is a top five killer of women for that age group. Road injuries have a substantial impact on maternal and child health. Health loss attributable to motorized road transport exceeds that from key risk factors affecting children, including childhood underweight and suboptimal breastfeeding.
• Pollution from vehicles is the cause of 184,000 deaths globally, including 91,000 deaths from ischemic heart disease, 59,000 deaths from stroke, and 34,000 deaths from lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. These figures are likely an underestimate, due to the limitations of available data.
• Official government statistics substantially underreport road injuries. Estimates based on GBD data suggest, for example, that road injury deaths are more than twice the official statistics in India, four times those in China, and more than six times the official numbers in parts of Africa. Underreporting ranges from 100%-500% in some low and middle income countries. 

The report sets out a series of policy recommendations. It emphasises that there is a strong financial case for investment in road safety with losses equivalent to 1%-3% of GDP per annum rising as high as 4-10% for some countries. The report recommends investing in national road safety agencies with legislative powers, safe road infrastructure and vehicle safety, enforcement and social marketing campaigns.

The report acknowledges that in investment plans for road projects, more effort is placed in estimating economic return than social benefit or social harms. Comparable efforts to quantify the full costs and benefits must be made. Analytical models of crash causation are needed. Similarly analytical models to characterise vehicle emissions that accompany road projects are needed.

A ‘multi-sectoral’ approach to address the health impacts of transport is needed, the report says. In particular promoting ‘active transport’ – walking and cycling –  is key. However, these programmes can make people vulnerable to road injury. Programmes are most successful when they employ an integrated approach that includes providing safe infrastructure such as sidewalks and bike lanes, supportive land use planning, and advocacy and education.

For air pollution, emissions controls technologies, catalysts and particle traps, and global agreement to lower sulphur content will be of critical importance, it concludes.

It is stated that human error accounts for nearly 90% of all road crashes. European car safety researchers have developed a camera-based system that watches your facial expressions while you drive, and then uses highly accurate emotion detection algorithms to work out when you’re suffering from road rage. The idea behind this system is that, when you’re irritated or angry, you become a more aggressive driver and less attentive — leading to more accidents.

If your face registers “anger” or “disgust” for long enough, the software decides that you are stressed out and probably about to do something stupid. Because this is a prototype, all the EPFL system does is tell you when you’re suffering from road rage — but presumably a production version of the technology would do a lot more. Maybe it would pre-charge your breaks, ready for when you tailgate the guy in front of you? Or maybe, if your car has some autonomous driving features, they could quietly take over — so you think you’re still driving, but it’s actually your car that’s preventing you from swerving out of your lane or piling into the car in front of you. Maybe such a system could disable your car’s horn, too…

Moving forward, LTS5 hopes it can use its computer vision to detect other states, such as distraction, and to read your lips, which could considerably help with in-car voice recognition. It’s also worth pointing out that similar systems are already in production vehicles — ExtremeTech’s car of the year, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, uses the steering wheel to detect when you’re drowsy. These systems don’t have quite the same range of emotion detection as camera-based solutions — but really, the ultimate system would combine both steering wheel and computer vision technologies, and also use sensors in your seat, noise sensors in the cockpit (noisy kids), and other clever techniques of assessing your road worthiness.

One day, when autonomous vehicles are the norm, you’ll be able to get into your car — and then it will automatically detect that you’re completely wasted, and then drive you home using a route that minimizes the risk of throwing up. One day.