Welcome to the
UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center Newsletter

This Issue:

Traffic Safety in a Global Context

Barely a century has passed since the invention of the motor vehicle. It has increased personal independence and mobility by magnitudes and has become the mainstay of local and regional commerce.  

However, the motor vehicle has also brought negative consequences.

The infrastructure to support it requires vast amounts of land, and its production requires a large industrial base employing immense quantities of natural resources. Emissions from gasoline and diesel engines comprise the single most important contributor to air pollution and to ozone depletion. This impact is felt globally. 

The motor vehicle has another negative consequence—the toll of injury and death that results from collisions. And, as motorization expands rapidly around the world, the burden of road traffic injuries and deaths is increasing. By 2020, road traffic injuries and deaths are projected to be the third most important contributor to the global burden of disease, according to World Health Organization estimates. Already, in 2000, they ranked ninth overall.

More than 3,200 people around the world die every day as a result of a traffic injury—85 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries, mostly among pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. That is, people who are not riding in motor vehicles. Because more than half of these victims are younger, able-bodied adults, the cost of these crashes to the economies of low- and middle-income countries is an estimated $65 billion each year—more than they receive in developmental aid.

In recognition of the serious impact of traffic injuries, the World Health Organization made road safety the focus of this year's World Health Day on April 7, 2004, with the goal of increasing the public's awareness that "road safety is no accident." The topic was brought into the center of global health discussions and planning, and not just for the newly motorizing parts of the world.

We begin this issue with an overview of the burden of road traffic injury and death: how this burden is projected to increase over coming decades because of rising motorization in low- and middle-income countries, and how traffic patterns and other elements of the traffic safety puzzle differ significantly from what has been the experience in wealthy, fully motorized countries. Then we discuss how road traffic injuries and deaths are forcing a new emphasis on injury in the broader public health picture and how they follow (and also deviate from) predictable patterns based on levels of motorization and affluence—possibly providing lessons for prevention at global, regional, and local levels. We then present a discussion of how traffic safety has been approached in Australia, an affluent and highly motorized country that now has one of the world's best traffic safety records, but at one time experienced a traffic fatality burden exceeding that of many poorer countries today.
We end with a description of the success and pitfalls pf a project to build the first major sidewalk in a fast-growing, historic city in India.

We invite your comments and suggestions. 

This newsletter was created by the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center (TSC) to disseminate important information on traffic safety topics most relevant to communities in California. The mission of the TSC is to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries through multi-disciplinary collaboration in education, research, and outreach. A main goal of the Center is to make traffic safety information available and accessible to public and private organizations, agencies, and businesses, and to individuals. 

The TSC newsletter is published quarterly. If you'd like to subscribe or unsubscribe to the mailing list, please visit this page of the TSC website.

Photo by Markus A. Jegerlehner [via bigfoto.com]

Editor:
Phyllis Orrick, Publications Director, Institute of Transportation Studies,
510-643-2591

In this Issue:

Traffic Safety Takes to a Global Stage
Road injury and its prevention emerge as an international health issue

Measuring the Burden
Disability and dangers strike different groups harder

 

Risk Patterns Old and New
Public Health's new world challenge



Learning from Australia
A high-income country's approach to a low-income fatality rate

It Takes a Huge Effort to Build a Sidewalk
The tale of one pedestrian safety project in a rapidly growing historic city in India
 

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