Skip to main content

Road deaths scandal: Greens back Parliamentary Report that calls for an end to the "Scandal of Complacency" on road deaths [Media Release]

Eastern Region Green Party is backing a report issued this week by the Parliamentary Transport Select Committee entitled "Ending the Scandal of Complacency: Road Safety beyond 2010".

The Report calls for a much bolder strategy to address road safety calling it the "major public health problem of our age."
As well as the human tragedies involved, the Committee found that the total cost of road crashes in the UK was a staggering £18 billion a year.

Green Party Councillors in Eastern Region and across the country have been active in calling for much better road safety to cut the annual toll of death and injury on the roads and to make roads and pavements much safer for walking and cycling. Greens believe that a safer road environment will encourage and enable people to walk and cycle more who are currently intimidated by traffic volumes and speeds.
 
Green Councillors in Norwich successfully won backing for a city wide 20mph zone that is to be trialled in three zones of the city from early 2009. In Essex, Green Party Councillors have helped to secure reductions in speed limits on rural roads below the default 60mph limit and are calling for a county wide reduction on all rural roads as part of a review that is currently underway.
 
Department for Transport figures for 2007 show that 3178 people in Eastern Region were involved in "KSI" road crashes - Killed or Seriously Injured. Of these, 335 people died - an average of almost a death every day on the roads of Eastern Region.
  
The Transport Committee recommended that local authorities be given more powers to introduce 20mph speed limits, increased enforcement to tackle drink-driving and the creation of a road safety commission.
 
Cllr. Rupert Read, Prospective Green Party MEP for Eastern Region said:
 
"We very much agree with the Transport Committee findings. Whilst the number of people killed or seriously injured is reducing, it is totally unacceptable that thousands of people are killed every year, and many more seriously injured.
The MPs are absolutely right to refer to this ongoing car-nage as a scandal.  The number of deaths and injuries on our roads far outweighs those in all other transport modes or in other work-related accidents put together. It is not just a failure of transport policy that this continues, but the major public health problem of our age.

"Road crashes affect the poor and the young most and are the largest single cause of death for people between the ages of 5 and 35 in Britain. Not only do we need much higher standards of road safety, we need the Green Party policy of integrated public transport to encourage people to make more use of safer means of transport, including trains and buses."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reasonable manners, in the blogosphere

Dear readers of Rupert's Read; One thing I am pleased about about this blog is that when we have had debates or disagreements here, they have virtually always been good-tempered. Because the norm out there in the blogosphere is often not like that. Take 'Comment is Free', for example, on the Guardian Unlimited site: the level of debate on CIF is pretty awful, frankly, in terms of civility. It is a very unpleasant place to take part in any debate, generally, unless perhaps (as most commenters do) one hides behind the veil of anonymity (which 'ain't allowed' here). And the truth is, in case any fellow commenters reading this don't realise it, that there are many many people who get put off even reading (let alone posting to) CIF because of the volume of plain nasty comments that they risk getting, when they do. I am slightly singling out CIF here, because I believe that this is actually one of the worst places on the blogosphere in terms of this kind of ...
15 comments
Read more

Medialens under the lens, over Syria and Libya: Becoming the new Dave Sparts?

I have long been an active supporter of Medialens ( http://www.medialens.org/ ). Like many others, I have supported them with money, time, tips, and I have been proud to have done so. For they have done very important groundbreaking work over the years challenging the inanities and distortions of the 'mainstream' media. They have for example written important critiques of mainstream media coverage of dangerous climate change, of Iraq Body Count, of the corporate nature of most of our media, and much more besides. They have held the corporate media to account time and again. They ought to be saluted for all of that. It is therefore with a sense of deep regret (as well as of some foreboding) that I have finally to write to address the ways in which, lately, some of the wheels seem to be coming off their wagon. An early warning sign perhaps was their long-running spat with George Monbiot, over the Rwandan genocide and the terrible atr...
16 comments
Read more