The 22nd Meeting of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration (UNRSC) took place recently and included updates from members in the world of global road safety. Part of the meeting was dedicated to the United Nations Global Road Safety Week, which is set for May 2017. The theme for the week is speed; the promotion of mesaures to reduce speed to save lives.
The UN Road Safety Collaboration is pleased to announce that the Fourth UN Global Road Safety Week will be held from 8-14 May 2017. The Week will focus on speed and what can be done to address this key risk factor for road traffic deaths and injuries. The Fourth UN Global Road Safety Week seeks to increase understanding of the dangers of speed and generate action on measures to address speed, thereby saving lives on the roads.
Speed contributes to around one-third of all fatal road traffic crashes in high-income countries, and up to half in low- and middle-income countries.
Countries successfully reducing road traffic deaths have done so by prioritizing safety when managing speed. Among the proven strategies to address speed include:
- Setting and enforcing speed limits appropriate to the function of each road, for example:
- Setting and enforcing a maximum speed limit of 50 kilometers per hour in urban areas;
- Setting and enforcing a maximum speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour on roads with high concentrations of pedestrians, cyclists and motorized traffic;
- Enforcing speed limits through the use of automatic speed cameras;
- Installing intelligent speed adaptation technology in vehicles;
- Building or modifying roads to include features that limit speed such as traffic lights, roundabouts and speed humps.
The Fourth UN Global Road Safety Week seeks to increase understanding of the dangers of speed and generate action on measures to address speed, thereby saving lives on the roads.
Save Lives: #SlowDown
We will be assisting the World Health Organization (WHO) on the coordination, production and dissemination of the fourth week. This week will follow the legacy of the #SaveKidsLives campaign, which was highly interactive and engaging attracting over 1 million people globally in support of its message.
In developing the week, a new online platform will be created to host the week, which will also host information about all other weeks. This ensures that the fourth week and subsequent weeks will be consistently engaging, easy to navigate and connected.
For now, organizations can register events for the Fourth UN Global Road Safety Week at WHO’s website:
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/week/2017/event-registration/en/