TRL is proudly supporting Road Safety Week, the UK’s biggest annual road safety campaign, organised by the road safety charity Brake.
Brake has been working with policy makers, communities and organisations across the UK since 1995 to encourage life-saving action for safe and healthy roads. Brake also cares for people bereaved and seriously injured in road crashes through the National Road Victim Service, providing trauma-informed emotional and practical support.
TRL is a world leader in transport safety and has developed products and expert services that have been proven to minimise and prevent road collisions. It is the first time that TRL has supported Road Safety Week in an official capacity, although it has been helping the charity for decades to achieve the shared ongoing mission to stop deaths and injuries on the UK’s roads.
The theme of this year’s Road Safety Week is ‘Safe Roads for All’. Everybody should have the right to move around in their communities and between places in safe and healthy ways. Sadly, all of us have the potential to be road crash victims, even if we think that it won’t happen to us. In addition, most of us breathe poisonous air from traffic every day of the week, causing more preventable deaths and illnesses.
“In the UK alone, there are more than 30 deaths from road crashes a week – equal to a Boeing 747 full of passengers falling from the sky every three months. Globally, there are a virtually incomprehensible 1.35 million road deaths a year, equivalent to about nine fully loaded jumbo jets crashing every day,” explains Mary Williams, CEO of Brake. “If the aviation industry had a safety record like that, planes would be grounded. But when it comes to our roads, there has been a view that road deaths and appalling injuries are an inevitable and acceptable trade-offs against our need to go places; they are not, and they can be stopped,” she concludes.
“It is really important that Brake highlights solutions that work, such as vehicle design improvements and reduced speed limits. Promoting measures like these, and evidenced research findings relating to these measures by TRL, is central to Brake’s work and helping everyone to understand why road safety improvements are happening, why more need to happen, and to make a difference in our own lives and spheres of influence, particularly employers and policy makers.
“This is why Road Safety Week matters,” adds TRL CEO Paul Campion. “It gives us an opportunity to elevate road safety in the minds of the public and policy makers, to show that road deaths and injuries are not inevitable and to explain how we already have significant evidence-based measures and solutions that can make our roads safer – if they are properly implemented,” he concludes.
Many of the improvements to road safety that we have seen in recent decades have been made as a result of TRL’s work, including child seats and reduced speed limits in built-up areas. Brake and TRL share many of the same goals in terms of creating transport systems that are safe, efficient, and designed with the needs of road users in mind first.