It’s official: Drink, drive, lose licence (Times of India,November26,2009)

New Delhi: Driving under the influence of alcohol can now cost you your licence. The Delhi High Court on Wednesday accepted the city transport department’s new guidelines to deal with the menace of drunken driving, among which is the provision of cancelling the offender’s driving licence. The stage is now set for the guidelines to be notified within four weeks.
The new rules arm the Delhi Police with the right to confiscate the licence of a driver found to have consumed alcohol beyond permissible limits. In such cases, a memo would be issued to the driver who would then have to make a representation before the transport department. The department would decide whether the offender’s licence should be suspended or cancelled.
The new guidelines are part of an intensification of the campaign against drunken driving ahead of the Commonwealth Games next year.

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New UN resolution recognises motorcycle safety

Source-http://www.ma.org.au/AM/Template.cfm?Section=News9&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=34970

FIM Chief Executive Officer Guy Maitre and Director of Public Affairs John Chatterton-Ross were in Moscow 19-20 November for the United Nations first Ministerial Conference on road safety.

Opening the conference the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev called for action on a worldwide crisis running at one million three hundred thousand road deaths every year.

President Medvedev called for action on road safety to match other global issues. “Road safety is one of the most serious problems of international development requiring immediate action.”

“We need coordinated international effort. – This is an issue on the level of the global recession and food security.

"The UN Decade of Action will coordinate activity. Like many countries, Russia would benefit from increased international cooperation on road safety if a Decade of Action was adopted.”

The four page declaration includes specific action on vulnerable road users. It reads:

Make particular efforts to develop and implement policies and infrastructure solutions to protect all road users in particular those who are most vulnerable such as pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and users of unsafe public transport, as well as children, the elderly and people living with disabilities.

FIM CEO Guy Maitre said: “It was vital to attend – the FIM is a family of 101 national federations representing motorcycling worldwide and our mission runs beyond sport, we are the global advocate for motorcycling.”

FIM Director of Public Affairs John Chatterton-Ross added: “Wire rope barriers? I don’t think so! You can be certain this new and very welcome UN action will be widely quoted from now on as we work with governments to improve safety for riders and other vulnerable road users across the world.”

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Video developed by Organizers of First Ministerial Conference,Moscow called-Time For Action

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Hadsoon Ka desh bharat-By NDTV

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First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety: Time for Action(Moscow Declaration)

Moscow, 19-20 November 2009

We, the Ministers and heads of delegations as well as representatives of international, regional and sub-regional governmental and nongovernmental organizations and private bodies gathered in Moscow, Russian Federation, from 19–20 November 2009 for the First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety,
Acknowledging the leadership of the Government of the Russian Federation in preparing and hosting this First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety and the leadership of the Government of the Sultanate of Oman in leading the process for adoption of related United Nations General Assembly resolutions,
Aware that as described in the 2004 World Health Organization/World Bank World report on road traffic injury prevention and subsequent publications, road traffic injuries are a major public health problem and leading cause of death and injury around the world and that road crashes kill more than 1.2 million people and injure or disable as many as 50 million a year, placing road traffic crashes as the leading cause of death for children and young people aged 5–29 years,
Concerned that more than 90% of road traffic deaths occur in low-income and middle-income countries and that in these countries the most vulnerable are pedestrians, cyclists, users of motorised two- and three-wheelers and passengers on unsafe public transport,
Conscious that in addition to the enormous suffering caused by road traffic deaths and injuries to victims and their families, the annual cost of road traffic injuries in low-income and middle-income countries runs to over USD 65 billion exceeding the total amount received in development assistance and representing 1–1.5% of gross national product, thus affecting the sustainable development of countries,
Convinced that without appropriate action the problem will only worsen in the future when, according to projections, by the year 2020 road traffic deaths will become one of the leading causes of death particularly for low-income and middle-income countries,
Underlining that the reasons for road traffic deaths and injuries and their consequences are known and can be prevented and that these reasons include inappropriate and excessive speeding; drinking and driving; failure to appropriately use seat-belts, child restraints, helmets and other safety equipment; the use of vehicles that are old, poorly maintained or lacking safety features; poorly designed or insufficiently maintained road infrastructure, in particular infrastructure which fails to protect pedestrians; poor or unsafe public transportation systems; lack of or insufficient enforcement of traffic legislation; lack of political awareness and lack of adequate trauma care and rehabilitation,
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Recognizing that a large proportion of road traffic deaths and injuries occur in the context of professional activities, and that a contribution can be made to road safety by implementing fleet safety measures,
Aware that over the last thirty years many high-income countries have achieved substantial reductions in road traffic deaths and injuries through sustained commitment to well-targeted, evidence-based injury prevention programmes, and that with further effort, fatality free road transport networks are increasingly feasible, and that high- income countries should, therefore, continue to establish and achieve ambitious road casualty reduction targets, and support global exchange of good practices in road injury prevention,
Recognizing the efforts made by some low- and middle-income countries to implement best practices, set ambitious targets and monitor road traffic fatalities,
Acknowledging the work of the United Nations system, in particular the long standing work of the United Nations Regional Commissions and the leadership of the World Health Organization, to advocate for greater political commitment to road safety, increase road safety activities, promote best practices, and coordinate road safety issues within the United Nations system,
Also acknowledging the progress of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration as a consultative mechanism whose members are committed to road safety and whose activities include providing governments and civil society with guidance on good practice to support action to tackle major road safety risk factors,
Acknowledging the work of other stakeholders, including intergovernmental agencies; regional financial institutions, nongovernmental and civil society organizations, and other private bodies,
Acknowledging the role of the Global Road Safety Facility established by the World Bank as the first funding mechanism to support capacity building and provide technical support for road safety at global, regional and country levels,
Acknowledging the report of the Commission for Global Road Safety Make roads safe: a new priority for sustainable development which links road safety with sustainable development and calls for increased resources and a new commitment to road infrastructure safety assessment,
Acknowledging the findings of the report of the International Transport Forum and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Towards zero: ambitious road safety targets and the safe system approach and its recommendation that all countries regardless of their level of road safety performance move to a safe system approach to achieve ambitious targets,
Acknowledging the findings of the World Health Organization/UNICEF World report on child injury prevention which identifies road traffic injuries as the leading cause of all unintentional injuries to children and describes the physical and developmental characteristics which place children at particular risk,
Recognizing that the solution to the global road safety crisis can only be implemented through multi-sectoral collaboration and partnerships among all concerned in both public and private sectors, with the involvement of civil society,
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Recognizing that road safety is a ‘cross cutting’ issue which can contribute significantly to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and that capacity building in road traffic injury prevention should be fully integrated into national development strategies for transport, environment and health, and supported by multilateral and bilateral institutions through a better aligned, effective, and harmonized aid effort,
Conscious that global results are the effect of national and local measures and that effective actions to improve global road safety require strong political will, commitment and resources at all levels: national and sub-national, regional and global,
Welcoming the World Health Organization's Global status report on road safety – the first country by country assessment at global level – which identifies gaps and sets a baseline to measure future progress,
Also welcoming the results of the projects implemented by the United Nations regional commissions to assist low-income and middle-income countries in setting their own road traffic casualty reduction targets, as well as regional targets,
Determined to build on existing successes and learn from past experiences,
Hereby resolve to:
1. Encourage the implementation of the recommendations of the World report on road traffic injury prevention,
2. Reinforce governmental leadership and guidance in road safety, including by designating or strengthening lead agencies and related coordination mechanisms at national or sub-national level;
3. Set ambitious yet feasible national road traffic casualty reduction targets that are clearly linked to planned investments and policy initiatives and mobilize the necessary resources to enable effective and sustainable implementation to achieve targets in the framework of a safe systems approach;
4. Make particular efforts to develop and implement policies and infrastructure solutions to protect all road users in particular those who are most vulnerable such as pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and users of unsafe public transport, as well as children, the elderly and people living with disabilities;
5. Begin to implement safer and more sustainable transportation, including through land-use planning initiatives and by encouraging alternative forms of transportation;
6. Promote harmonization of road safety and vehicle safety regulations and good practices through the implementation of relevant United Nations resolutions and instruments and the series of manuals issued by the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration;
7. Strengthen or maintain enforcement and awareness of existing legislation and where needed improve legislation and vehicle and driver registration systems using appropriate international standards;
8. Encourage organizations to contribute actively to improving work-related road safety through adopting the use of best practices in fleet management;
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9. Encourage collaborative action by fostering cooperation between relevant entities of public administrations, organizations of the United Nations system, private and public sectors, and with civil society;
10. Improve national data collection and comparability at the international level, including by adopting the standard definition of a road death as any person killed immediately or dying within 30 days as a result of a road traffic crash and standard definitions of injury; and facilitating international cooperation to develop reliable and harmonized data systems;
11. Strengthen the provision of prehospital and hospital trauma care, rehabilitation services and social reintegration through the implementation of appropriate legislation, development of human capacity and improvement of access to health care so as to ensure the timely and effective delivery to those in need;
Invite the United Nations General Assembly to declare the decade 2011–2020 as the “Decade of Action for Road Safety” with a goal to stabilize and then reduce the forecast level of global road deaths by 2020;
Decide to evaluate progress five years following the First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety;
Invite the international donor community to provide additional funding in support of global, regional and country road safety, especially in low- and middle-income countries; and
Invite the UN General Assembly to assent to the contents of this declaration.
Moscow, Russian Federation
20 November 2009

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Safety on the roads: joining forces to save lives - Multilateral Development Banks say five million deaths, 50 million injuries could be avoided

Seven Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) today issued a joint statement outlining a broad package of measures that each would implement in order to reduce an anticipated and alarming rise in the number of road fatalities and casualties in developing countries.

The participating MDBs are the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank and the World Bank.

The MDBs said the joint initiatives they will undertake are important steps in a growing program of work they will undertake as international development partners.

The measures to be carried out fall into four broad categories:

* Strengthening road safety management capacity;
* Implementing safety approaches in the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of road infrastructure projects;
* Improving safety performance measures; and
* Mobilizing more and new resources for road safety.

“All MDB’s are committed to taking a leading role to address what is becoming one of the most significant public health development priorities of the early 21st century,” said Jamal Saghir, Director of Energy, Transport, and Water at the World Bank, speaking on behalf of the participating MDBs. “As development professionals, we will work together to bring this growing epidemic on the roads of low and middle-income countries under control over the coming decade. We also have a longer-term vision of eliminating these unnecessary and unacceptable deaths and injuries.”

In their joint statement, the MDBs said they welcomed the upcoming First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety to be held in Moscow on 19 and 20 November, 2009, as it draws attention to a global issue of increasing importance to the organizations. Improving road safety, they said, is a development priority in developing and emerging countries. It calls for scaled-up global, regional, and country responses to bring the growing numbers of road deaths and injuries toll under control.

Over the first 30 years of this century it is estimated that more cars will be produced in the world than during the first hundred years of motorization. As a result, millions of road deaths and injuries must be anticipated, unless sustained measures are taken to prevent them. Updated projections of global mortality and the burden of disease made by the World Health Organization indicate that road traffic injuries are set to be the fourth biggest cause of healthy life years lost in developing and emerging countries by 2030, and from 2015 onto 2030 they will be the biggest cause of healthy life years lost for children aged between 5 and 14, unless new measures are taken to prevent them.

GRSF estimates indicate that reducing road fatalities and injuries in low and middle-income countries over the coming decade would save an estimated 5 million lives and avoid 50 million serious injuries, resulting in a huge social benefit.

In the face of this mounting crisis there has been a concerted global call for action to promote a systematic, multi-sectoral response. There is also the recognition that shared initiatives can accelerate the transfer of road safety knowledge to developing and emerging countries and scale up their road safety investment.

The MDB signatories to the joint statement say they have an important role to play in this process, given their engagement in the development programs of partner countries through policy dialogue, analytical and advisory services, and lending and guarantee products to the public and private sectors. In particular, increased provision of road infrastructure is essential to development success, but its sustainable safety for users must be assured.The Joint Statement of the Multilateral Development Banks and media contact points are attached.

For more information, please visit: Global Road Safety Facility www.worldbank.org/grsf

A Shared Approach to Managing Road Safety

Joint Statement by the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank and the World Bank

Global call for action

1. We acknowledge the scale of the public health crisis arising from deaths and injuries on the roads of developing and emerging countries, the recommendations of the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention , the global call for action from World Health Assembly Resolution WHA57.10 (Road safety and health) and UN General Assembly Resolutions 56/289, 60/5 and 62/244 (Improving global road safety).

Systematic, multisectoral response

2. We recognize that a systematic, multisectoral response is required to address this global crisis including interventions that improve the safety of road infrastructure, vehicles, road user behavior and post-crash services, and we support the principles of the Safe System approach aiming at (i) developing road transport systems prevention, reduction and accommodation of human error; (ii) taking into account social costs and impacts of road trauma in the development and selection of investment program; (iii) establishing shared responsibility for road safety among all stakeholders; (iv) creating effective and comprehensive management and communications structures for road safety; and (v) aligning safety management decision making with broader societal decision making to meet economic, human and environmental goals, and to create an environment that generates demand for safe road transport products and services. We recognize the relevance of this approach to all countries irrespective of their economic or road safety performance. More specifically, we note that a significant and sustained contribution to fatality reduction will come from road infrastructure safety improvements.

Shared approach

3. We also recognize that our respective organizations expect to remain significantly engaged in the provision of road infrastructure in developing and emerging countries over the coming decade, and beyond, and we commit to share our organizational practices and knowledge to support (i) the strengthening of road safety management capacity of our clients; (ii) the implementation of safety approaches in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of road infrastructure projects, particularly to improve safe access and protection for vulnerable road users who represent a significant proportion of the people served by the projects we finance; (iii) the improvement of safety performance measures; and (iv) the mobilization of resources for road safety.

4. To achieve this approach we will share the complementary skills and practices we each develop in our respective operations in the areas of:

(i) Strengthening road safety management capacity

* Help establish country-specific mechanisms for improving road safety management functions and safety practices aiming at achieving the sustainable, effective, and cost-efficient reduction of road casualties.
* Create awareness for safety in order to achieve informed decisions by countries on the planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance of road infrastructure assets and networks.
* Improve communications, cooperation, and collaboration among global, regional and country institutions in the area of road safety and facilitate the dissemination of up-to-date safety-related information.
* Provide our staff development and training to facilitate the successful implementation of shared procedures, guidelines and related tools.
* Contribute to the training of transportation safety professionals in developing and emerging countries by financing efforts such as the development of road safety education programs, manuals and training materials promoting good practices related to road safety, to facilitate the implementation of improved road safety practices and procedures.

(ii) Implementation of safety approaches in the planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance of road infrastructure projects

* Develop shared procedures, guidelines and related tools to implement a safety approach to the planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance of road infrastructure projects.
* Ensure that safety is integrated in all phases of planning, design, construction, appraisal, operation and maintenance of road infrastructure.
* Promote the adoption of good practice, proactive approaches to improve the safety of road infrastructure including the use of road safety audits, road safety inspections, and road safety impact assessments.
* Develop specific approaches to address the safety requirements of vulnerable road users (pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists), including a special focus on urban areas where a high proportion of trauma occurs.

(iii) Improvement of safety performance measures

* Promote the establishment of sustainable management systems for road crash data collection, entry, verification, storage, retrieving and analysis, including GIS-based applications.
* Promote the use of good practice quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure safety results.
* Promote the development, piloting, and objective validation of innovative safety indicators, such as the safety rating of roads.

(iv) Mobilization of resources for road safety

* Transfer road safety knowledge and experience across and within our organizations, and to our global, regional and country partners.
* Support the mobilization of additional domestic and external resources for road safety.
* Support the mission and goals of the Global Road Safety Facility in its promotion of innovative solutions to road safety issues.
* Establish as needed an expert technical group comprising staff from our respective organizations and international specialists to assist in the development of shared approaches to road safety.
* Identify, and pursue opportunities for scaling up road safety in countries strategies.

Timetable for action

5. We will commence the development and implementation of this shared approach to managing road safety immediately and we will meet in 2010 to assess progress of the implementation of this statement.

Source

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Terrorism on the Roads

As a former NATO secretary-general, I am familiar with the cold calculus of potential body counts applied in assessing threats to national security. But I’m still taken aback by our collective failure to face up to one of the gravest and most preventable security risks facing people across the world — the risk of death and disability on the world’s roads.

This year 1.3 million people will die on the world’s roads. About 40 times this number will be seriously injured. The vast majority of these deaths and injuries — 90 percent of the total — will occur in developing countries. In most of the world’s poorest countries “death by traffic” is a bigger killer than major diseases. Road injuries kill more children aged 5 to 14 in poor countries than malaria or AIDS. And they are the single biggest killer of 15- to 29-year-olds. The threats associated with roads massively outweigh those posed by terrorism. Each day, road accidents cause a loss of life equivalent to 10 jumbo jet crashes.

In Russia, 33,308 people died in road accidents in 2007, or more than 91 per day, according to the World Health Organization’s “Global Status Report on Road Safety.” In addition, 292,206 were injured. Thus, the death rate on Russia’s roads was more than 25 fatalities per 100,000, about double the U.S. rate of 13.9 and five times higher than in Britain, which has 5.4 and one of the best safety records in Europe. The WHO report also found that an extremely high percentage of victims on the roads — 36 percent — were pedestrians.

Had someone shown me the body count numbers when I was at NATO, I would have assumed that I was looking at the impact of a high-intensity civil conflict. I might have anticipated campaigns for humanitarian intervention. Yet for the most part, governments and aid agencies turn a blind eye.

It is easy to understand why road safety does not make headlines. With the international agenda dominated by the global challenges of climate change and recovery from the financial crisis, roads appear of peripheral concern — a subject for a convention of civil engineers maybe, not a world summit. That is precisely the thinking that has brought us to where we are now.

On Thursday, governments from around the world will gather in Moscow for the first-ever global ministerial conference on road safety. They have an opportunity to tackle head-on a humanitarian crisis that is destroying lives on a vast scale, undermining progress in poverty reduction, crippling health systems and holding back economic growth. For millions of vulnerable children, the outcome of the Moscow summit is — quite literally — a matter of life or death.

The future looks bleak. While road deaths are falling in rich countries, they are spiraling in the developing world. Current projections point to fatalities doubling by 2030, with an estimated 2.4 million losing their lives.

There is something deeply disturbing about the international response to road traffic injuries. When lives are threatened by the H1NI flu pandemic, governments issue crisis prevention policies — and rightly so. Yet an epidemic that sends a quarter of a million young people to an early grave each year barely registers on the radar screen of world leaders.

Why the neglect? One of the main fallacies is that road injuries are the collateral damage of development itself — an inevitable consequence of investment in transport infrastructure and the growing demand for vehicles.

This type of thoughtless fatalism costs lives. There are few unknowns with road injuries. The causes and the simple preventative cures are well known. Tens of thousands of children die each year because major highways are routed between their homes, often in informal slums, and schools. Try to imagine sending your 7-year-old off on a daily journey that involves negotiating a six-lane highway. The solution: build protected overpasses and regulate road design to avoid human settlements.

The major killers are easy to identify. Roads that don’t separate pedestrians from vehicles, failure to enforce laws on speeding and drunk driving, and the wearing of seat belts and helmets are recurrent themes. Tried and tested interventions demonstrate what is possible. Rwanda for example, has been more successful than most of its neighbors in tackling the road traffic crisis through stricter enforcement of vehicle standards and speed limits.

Road crashes typically cost developing countries from 1 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product each year, undermining national prosperity and job creation. The question that finance ministers should ask is not whether road safety is affordable, but whether they can afford not to act.

The Moscow summit could chart a new course by pressing the United Nations to adopt a Decade of Action for Road Safety aiming to halve the projected increase in the forecast level of road fatalities by 2020. The goal could save 5 million lives and prevent 50 million serious injuries.

International development agencies like the World Bank should ensure that road safety assessments become a standard for future funding decisions. More developing country governments should draw up national plans for cutting road deaths supported by a $300 million international action plan, as proposed by the Make Roads Safe campaign.

Above all, the Moscow summit provides an opportunity to rethink the links between transport policy and development. We need to reject the business model that measures a nation’s economic progress in terms of kilometers of roads while turning a blind eye to avoidable human suffering. And we need to put road safety at the heart of the international development agenda.

Former NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson is chairman of the Commission for Global Road Safety.
Source-Moscow times

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