U.S. Starts Road Safety 'Decade' This Week
The lead event on May 11 in Washington, D.C., includes Norman Mineta, a former DOT secretary. Agencies and governments around the world also are launching road safety campaigns as part of the UN action.
The UN's Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 begins in earnest this week with events taking place in Washington, D.C., and many other cities around the world. The World Health Organization published a "Global Status Report on Road Safety" in 2009 estimating that traffic injuries kill nearly 1.3 million people annually, and crashes would become the fifth-highest cause of death by 2030 if current trends continued.
WHO is at work on a second report that will be published in 2012.
The U.S. launch on May 11 is scheduled to include a Washington, D.C., event hosted by Norman Mineta, who was transportation secretary during the George W. Bush administration, and featuring remarks by members of Congress and government officials, Sesame Street PSAs, and Youth Choice Awards. A congressional briefing held later in the day will include remarks by Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC's director; Dr. Stephen Hargarten, professor and chairman of emergency medicine and associate dean for global health at the Medical College of Wisconsin; and Dr. Adnan Hyder, director of the International Injury Research Unit at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Rochelle Sobel, president of the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT), will outline some of the global initiatives for the decade. The event is sponsored by U.S. Congressional Caucus on Global Road Safety.
A toolkit for event organizers is available in several languages at this website.