Introduction

"When building the Europe of the future, we need every individual's unique talents, and we cannot accept a situation where the lives and health of our youngsters are permanently at risk owing to everyday traffic. Improving traffic safety for children and young people is in keeping with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child."

"Inadequate road safety must be viewed as a major public health problem throughout the EU, since life expectancy is reduced... and there is an adverse effect on public health as a whole, as so many people lose their lives or are injured for life."

"We must stop viewing road safety primarily as a matter of telling road users to pull themselves together. Instead, we must, as we do in aviation for example, develop systems to prevent the damage which human error can cause. Then we can create a refined, quality-assured man-machine system for our roads…the number of fatalities and injuries on Europe's roads is not something which is predetermined. We must, however, make this issue a political priority." (From Motion for a Resolution, 2000).

The European Parliament has acknowledged the huge problem of road death and injury as "totally unacceptable" and has adopted a resolution on 18.1.2001, which considers a range of measures to address this "major public health problem":

• 95% of all traffic 'accidents' occur on the road
• In the EU countries, there are more than 45,000 road deaths and over 2 million injuries each year. Many of those deaths and injuries are of children and young people. This has a devastating effect not only on families, but also on society as a whole. Most people too are killed or injured as vulnerable road users - pedestrians, cyclists and moped riders.
• According to the European Commission, the socio-economic cost of this carnage is a minimum of 60 billion Euros - a cost far above the cost of the prevention of crashes.

The decrease in road casualties appears to have come to a halt. With an expected substantial increase in traffic, it is imperative to step up action now. The measures taken to date have been mainly ad hoc and not in keeping with the scale and importance of the road safety problem.

Since the Treaty of Amsterdam, road safety has become the responsibility of the European Parliament, European Commission and European Council of Transport Ministers, who have the duty to make transport safety the explicit objective of a common transport policy, together with national, regional and local authorities.

The European Parliament states that: "an efficient road safety policy requires strong political leadership at all levels, from local authorities to the EU"...It also states that: "excessive and inappropriate speed are universally acknowledged as having the most detrimental effect on road safety".

In this Resolution, the European Parliament

• Affirms, that to improve road safety, the main priority of transport policy is to provide the necessary financial resources
• Considers the following measures as priorities:
  • fitting of speed limiters on goods vehicles weighing more than 3,5 tonnes
  • support of a seat-belt campaign
  • a European standard for police crash reports, to enable a proper comparison between countries
• Calls on Member States to enforce compliance of blood alcohol limits more strictly
• Believes that no single death on European roads can be justified and that therefore the long-term objective must be that no European citizen should be killed or seriously injured in the road transport system, similar to that for other transport modes and that an action programme for 2002-2010, with clearly defined goals, must start immediately and include crash prevention, injury prevention and post impact care.

The European Parliament believes that it is the Commission who should coordinate, report and publish achievements of the Member States, at regular intervals.

The Parliament wants to see the main road safety issues addressed, especially excess and inappropriate speed, excess alcohol and use of other substances, high crash involvement of young novice drivers, and insufficient crash protection provided by vehicles and infrastructure.

Regarding speed, the Parliament asks the Commission to "examine what kind of controls and substantial sanctions would lead to significantly better compliance with speed limits" and states that "the safety conscious behaviour of road users, particularly driving behaviour, must be improved".

For the first time, the European Parliament addresses post crash care, when asking that road safety policy must include "rescue, care and rehabilitation measures and guidelines to improve medical assistance to victims", and provide "better assistance in legal and social issues to victims and their families".

The Member countries which have signed the Schengen Convention on free movement between their countries (GB is one of four which have not) are invited to harmonise their road traffic offences, as well as the "enforcement of penalties imposed in respect thereof".

In conclusion, the European Parliament instructs its President to forward this Resolution to the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the Governments of the Member States.

The European Federation of Road Traffic Victims and RoadPeace believe that Members of both Houses of the UK Parliament, as well as UK MEP s, should be fully aware of the details of this resolution, in order to be able to take appropriate action and save many thousands of lives.

Full text of the European Parliament's Resolution is available on: http://europa.eu.int