The public health epidemic everyone wants to forget

BrigitteChaudhry  4.7.2001

It will be 105 years on 17 August since the death of Bridget Driscoll, the first person in Britain to be killed by a car. During those years, countless millions have lost their lives and been injured in crashes and every year, hundreds of thousands of new victims are added to those already bereaved and injured.

Unlike other disasters, road carnage gets scant attention.

In 1999, the reported road death toll - 3,564 (similar to previous years) - was the equivalent of:

5 Lockerbie disasters,

plus 140 Hatfield disasters

plus 50 Paddington train crashes

plus the Concorde disaster in Paris

During the same period 330,159 people were reported injured.

The true scale of road death and injury is far worse still -

based on hospital (not police) data, the annual number of injured is almost double and serious injuries are three time higher than the reported 40,000

deaths occurring more than 30 days after the crash are not reflected in the fatality figures

What is society's and government's response to this mass disaster?

Well, it's not being acknowledged as such - what happens on the roads are only 'accidents'. This attitude is upheld in the coroners' courts, where "accidental death" verdicts are virtually automatic, and in Magistrates' Courts, where drivers who have killed as the result of breaches of law are only charged with minor traffic offences, with the fact of death treated as irrelevant and not even recorded on court records. The injured have to struggle for years to receive civil damages, which are often reduced due to lack of a criminal prosecution.

No department owns up to responsibility for road crash victims. The DoH has yet to acknowledge road death and injury as the major public health issue it is, despite the tremendous burden on the health service (if under-reporting is taken into account, the total injury cost alone could be over £18 billion). Last year's DETR's Road Safety Strategy left out completely post impact care. The Home Office's Victim's Charter so far has excluded road traffic victims.

RoadPeace, the national charity for road traffic victims, was set up in 1992 in response to the desperate need of those victims for timely and accurate information, immediate to long term support and practical help and advice with complex and confusing legal procedures. RoadPeace represents the interests of road victims and has worked consistently over the past ten years to bring to attention the terrible road death and injury toll and the casual treatment of killing and maiming by car.

Road crashes shatter lives and impose an intolerable burden on society. Not presenting the true picture of road danger will lull people into a false sense of security, it will not make the problem go away. Road death and injury represent a major public health issue, the inappropriate legal and political response make it clearly also a major human rights' issue, both need to be addressed urgently.