On behalf of the World Bank Group I am honored to address this distinguished audience this morning, to present our views on road traffic crashes as a development issue.
I also wish to express our gratitude to the Russian Federation for hosting this conference and for the leadership shown by President Medvedev in highlighting the economic and social devastation of road deaths and injuries and making the case that these destructive outcomes are preventable.
In my brief presentation I will address three key points.
First, I will talk about development; because it is not necessarily self-evident that road safety is a development issue.
Second, I will outline key challenges to be faced over the coming decade by the development community in bringing the public health crisis on our roads under control.
Third, I will describe the initiatives that we are taking at the World Bank to address road safety as a development priority.
First point: the issue of development
Let me state unequivocally, road crashes are a development issue.
Development targets poverty reduction and promotes higher living standards for all, with an emphasis on improved access to infrastructure services, health, education and people’s ability to participate in the economy and society.
This inclusiveness is central to country development strategies which aim to improve aggregate economic performance and address the priorities of education and health, and social and stakeholder participation.
As the absence of development, poverty can be understood as the inability to achieve basic prescribed standards in these priorities. In this regard the sheer scale of the historic and projected health losses from road crashes alone put road safety on the development agenda.
As already discussed this morning, the scale of the public health crisis unfolding on the roads of low and middle-income countries is staggering. By 2050 the world’s population is expected to reach nine billion people, having increased by almost 50% from today, with almost all of the increase coming in developing countries. The world economy is set to grow four-fold by 2050. Combining projected world population trends over the next 50 years with increased urbanization, there is a need to re-think our uses of transport systems. In particular, over the first 50 years of this century we can expect around 75 million road deaths and 750 million serious injuries, with absolute certainty, unless new measures are taken to prevent them.
This is no longer a public health crisis we can turn away from. The projected losses in life and life quality over the coming decades and the resulting pain and suffering inflicted on the victims and their families are unacceptable.
We can no longer acquiesce to the fatalistic view that low and middle-income countries must repeat the historical road safety experience of the high-income countries and take 50 years or so to bring their road safety outcomes under control.
We must eliminate these huge losses in life and life quality, as a development priority.
While they are an unintended consequence of the development process they can be anticipated, planned for and prevented.
Second point: key challenges
In moving from advocacy to action we must implement measures that are sustainable over the longer term, integrated with key development goals, and inclusive of all road users and citizens.
I will briefly discuss each of these challenges.
Our first challenge is that we cannot expect immediate results. It will take at least a decade to bring road safety outcomes under control in low and middle-income countries on a sustainable basis. We must make a long-term commitment to this, and accelerate and scale up our actions.
Measures taken will require proper sequencing. Most significantly, institutional capacity strengthening is a precursor to effective institutional delivery of safety services.
For example, sustainable general deterrence road policing will require strong commitment, leadership and accountability from the Police high command and this capacity must be built. For this reason we are working with eminent leaders from the international Police community – some of whom are here today – to create RoadPol, an entity designed to support the leadership of road policing in low and middle-income countries.
Sustainable general deterrence road policing will also require robust entry and exit controls for vehicles and drivers and these institutional systems must be in place before the full power of safety compliance regimes can be felt. Our second challenge is that road safety measures must be integrated with other key development priorities. The world is rapidly urbanizing. Climate change is an urgent and major development challenge. Energy security is vital. Good governance underpins effective progress. Global health is paramount.
Road safety cannot be addressed in isolation of these development priorities; without risking being displaced by them. Systematically addressing congestion, local air pollution, energy security and road safety can strongly increase the opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to the achievement of a sustainable development path.
For example, safer facilities for walking and cycling and lower vehicle speeds would result in reduced greenhouse gas emissions, local air pollution and energy consumption. As a consequence we would see less road deaths and injuries, and less deaths and loss of life quality arising from poor air quality and sedentary lifestyles.
Measures taken must be aligned with this bigger picture and the co-benefits of an integrated development strategy must be clearly articulated and quantified to the extent possible. Making the linkages and showing the co-benefits between improved road safety and the achievement of other higher profile development goals will be crucial to achieving the support needed for the proposed Decade of Action for Road Safety and its ambitious performance goals. Road safety must be perceived and implemented in an integrated fashion and not in isolation.
Our third challenge is that safety measures taken must be inclusive of all road users and citizens.
It is a cruel irony is that the consequences of road crashes directly impact the poor in low and middle-income countries, even though generally they have done the least to cause them. The majority of road deaths and injuries in these countries are and will be among the poor – the ‘vulnerable road users’ –pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists. Children are particularly at risk.
Yet the poor and those thrust into poverty as a consequence of road crashes are often left powerless in the face of large-scale infrastructure provision and rapid motorization.
Measures taken must be responsive to the priorities and rights of the poor who should not bear the burden of scaling up investment in road transport systems. Infrastructure solutions should meet the requirements of all users, especially those most vulnerable and least protected, and more inclusive planning and service provision is vital to make roads safe for everyone.
The lessons learned from past experience have shaped our appreciation of these three challenges of sustainability, integration and inclusiveness. In general our projects and those of our partners have been too small and too fragmented to achieve measurable results, and they have been focused on safety interventions alone and not taken account of the institutional capacity required to implement them effectively. Measures taken must be systematic and at scale. We cannot continue with the fragmented and partial responses of the past thirty years. Much more is needed.
Many billions of dollars will be spent on road infrastructure and services in low and middle-income countries over the coming decades. We are currently averaging around $2.7 billion per year on World Bank road investments and estimate that our partners in the multinational development banks are averaging around a total of $10 billion per year. If this level of funding continues over the next decade we can anticipate over $120 billion of road investment from the multilateral development banks alone, and this will be a tiny fraction of the total investment.
We must seek more road safety from this investment. We all must scale up our efforts and make more donor grant funding available to assist countries accelerate the development of sustainable road safety management systems. The pay-off to countries from these investments will be huge in economic terms, and immeasurable in terms of the improved quality of life for their citizens.
Third point: World Bank Group Initiatives
So what are we doing about it?
At the World Bank we acknowledge our responsibility to promote improved road safety in our client countries. We have around 30 years experience in working with our clients on this and the lessons learned are shaping the new initiatives that we are now rolling out:
In May last year the World Bank Group issued a new Transport Business Strategy, Safe, Clean and Affordable Transport for Development which places a high priority on improved road safety. The emphasis is on a proactive approach of building safety in at the outset, rather than the traditional approach of reacting to the lack of safety when it reveals itself. For example, the benefits of having median barriers to eliminate deaths and injuries from head-on crashes can be anticipated and captured with their immediate installation, rather than waiting several years for these deaths and injuries to occur in sufficiently high numbers to warrant intervention. Likewise deaths and injuries occurring at road junctions can be largely eliminated by the adoption of roundabout designs, rather than signalized or sign-posted junctions which result in more catastrophic injury outcomes.
Under the new strategy we are looking to accelerate road safety knowledge transfer and scale up road safety investment. This requires a shift from smaller fragmented road safety components that cannot produce measurable improvements, to what we have termed Safe System projects. Safe System projects are larger scale, systematic investments that produce measurable and sustainable results, and which encompass institutional capacity building and the creation of sustainable funding mechanisms as a core objective. We have just released new guidelines for the preparation of Safe System projects and copies are available here at this conference.
We have created the Global Road Safety Facility as the first funding mechanism designed to support global, regional and country capacity building initiatives, and we are actively seeking ways to scale up its funding base. This includes exploring the potential of innovative financing initiatives which are currently under development to support other major public health priorities
We have recently reached agreement with our partners in the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and Islamic Development Bank on a shared approach to road safety management. This is a significant milestone and we all look forward to a mutually beneficial and productive partnership over the coming decade.
In promoting these new initiatives, we recognize that we must act purposefully and collectively on a hitherto unprecedented scale. We must have a vision that calls for the mobilization of sufficient funding, expertise and tools to bring under control the otherwise shocking road safety outcomes impacting disproportionately on the poor in low and middle-income countries.
To conclude, the lack of road safety is an issue that gets to the heart of development. It concerns wasted and impoverished lives, the tragic and unnecessary costs of progress, the pain and suffering of victims and their families.
Improving road safety is something we can all take responsibility for, it is something we can all contribute to. And this contribution will in turn contribute to the achievement of the development goals that have been set by nations and their partners in the global community.
Yet here today we are only standing on the threshold of real action – for all we have done and achieved so far – and our next steps are going to have to be big ones, perhaps far bigger than many envisage, if we want to look back in ten years time and say that the actions we committed too here in Moscow made a real difference, for the good.
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