Traffic accidents account for more than a million deaths and 50 million injuries each year worldwide; children 5 to 14 are most at risk
Fatality rates in developing countries are 25-30 per 10,000 vehicles, compared to 1 to 2 per 10,000 vehicles in rich nations
The cost of traffic deaths and injuries could be as high as 5 percent of a country’s GDP
January 14, 2009—Two men and a young child share a motorcycle seat in urban Brazil. They aren’t wearing helmets.
In India, a girl skips happily, eyes shut, on the edge of the road as cars pass closely by.
Parked cars and vendors hog sidewalks in the Philippines, forcing pedestrians onto the street.
These are a few of the images captured by 1,500 children in seven countries for a project and photo essayon road traffic safety last fall.
Traffic accidents claim the lives of more than 700 children a day, according to the World Report on Child Injury Prevention, released last month. Some 93 percent of these kids lived in low- and middle-income countries.
“The poor are substantially and materially the victims of road traffic injuries in low and middle-income countries, and these problems are growing,” says World Bank road safety expert Tony Bliss.
Among children and adults, there are more than a million deaths and 50 million injuries worldwide each year. Even children in conflict-affected Kabulsay they have lost more relatives to car crashes than to war.
Problem to Get Worse
By 2030, the problem is expected to get much worse, and not just for children.
Cars, motorcycles and other vehicles are flooding narrow, busy streets in developing countries. The explosive growth in motorcycles, in particular, along with high speeds and lack of regulation, is contributing to the high rates of death and injury, Bliss.
And recent World Bank-supported research indicates that the number of road-related deaths and injuries may actually be much greater than current statistics show. The cost of traffic deaths and injuries can be as high as 5 percent of a country’s GDP.
Traffic congestion in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Researchers say that if nothing is done to make roads safer, by 2030, road deaths could become the fourth or fifth leading cause of death in low- and middle-income countries, and become a “far bigger problem” than such health concerns as malaria and tuberculosis, says Bliss.
Children 5 to 14 will be most at risk, with road traffic accidents projected to become the leading cause of death or injury among that group by 2015, and the second leading cause of healthy life years lost among adult men by 2030.
Pattern of Inaction
Yet road safety has been slow to surface as an issue, says Bliss, and hasn’t garnered resources commiserate with the scale of loss caused by unsafe roads and accidents.
Bliss says the “invisible nature” of the problem, and the “slow insidious loss of life,” has resulted in inaction in most developing countries. “There is a pattern of living with it for a period before acting.”
He points out that high-income nations took 40 or 50 years to reduce fatality rates to the current 1 to 2 per 10,000 vehicles, compared to rates as high as 25-30 per 10,000 vehicles or higher in developing countries.
Shortening the Learning Curve
Road safety advocates argue that high-income nations should help developing countries avoid the “bitter” learning curve they experienced through decades of trial and error.
The Commission for Global Road Safety recommends G8 countries adopt a 10-year $300 million action plan to help developing countries build their capacity to make roads safer.
The commission also recommended that 10 percent of all road infrastructure projects be committed to road safety.
The first United Nations Ministerial Conference on Global Road Safety is slated to be held in Moscow in November.
World Bank Help
The World Bank launched the Global Road Safety Facilityin 2005 to generate and catalyze increased funding to support initiatives aimed at reducing deaths and injuries in low and middle-income countries. The facility is supported by FIA Foundation, the Government of the Netherlands, the Government of Sweden, and the World Bank's Development Grant Facility.
The Bank is providing $35 million in financing for a project—its first—focusing strictly on road safety in Vietnam, where road accidents were costing the country as much as 5 percent of GDP.
The Bank is supporting another project in Iran aimed at improving road safety in six corridors with high accident rates.
Bliss says there could be big returns for relatively small investments in low and middle income countries. Shaping infrastructure to be “more protective” could have a big impact, as could simply getting countries to dedicate funds to road safety.
“Somehow it’s got to be part of the budgetary process and the value of prevention conveyed to society. The faster you get that discussion going the better,” says Bliss.
Reducing Road Fatalities in Vietnam
It isn’t unusual to happen upon a traffic accident involving serious injury or fatality along the highways in Vietnam. Every day, 35 to 40 people in Vietnam die as a result of a traffic accident.
As millions of motorcycles poured into Vietnam’s roads amid rapid economic growth in the late 1990s and 2000s, the number of people being rushed to trauma units increased dramatically. At Viet Duc, the major trauma referral centre for Northern Vietnam, traffic accidents account for nearly over 64 percent of all injuries treated and of these 74 percent are as a result of motorcycle accidents.
By 2002, with accident rates well above those of industrialized countries and facing an economic hit as high as 5 percent of GDP, Vietnam knew it had to act, says World Bank lead road safety specialist Tony Bliss.
Today, Vietnam is tackling road safety with about $100 million in assistance from donors, including the World Bank ($35 million).
The effort focuses on the three most dangerous roads in the country, where over 50 percent of Vietnam’s traffic fatalities occur.
The World Bank, in its first project dedicated solely to road safety, is supporting efforts to improve road engineering, policing, public road safety education, and post-crash response.
It’s also helping authorities to beef up enforcement of helmet, drunk driving, and other regulations that were either non-existent or rarely enforced with the project began in 2005.
The goal has also been to help develop an overall national strategy on road safety, including “innovative enforcement strategies successfully applied in other countries,” says Jerry Lebo, who led the Bank project team in 2005.
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