10-06-2017, 06:55 AM
Road safety experts from across the UK - and as far away as Cyprus and Hong Kong - gathered in Birmingham in February to try to address the road safety challenges they face during difficult financial times.The seminar looked closely at the challenges facing road safety professionals in the current economic climate and underlined the importance of evidence-based practice and evaluation to make the most of tight budgets.In fact, in light of declining budgets - especially within local authorities - RoSPA's annual three-day road safety congress became a one-day seminar to allow as many delegates as possible. It was very encouraging to see so many road safety professionals present, and willing to listen to some interesting ideas.Carrying out road safety interventions will be a challenge; Not only in the UK, but throughout the world and it is vital that all the good work that has been done will not be undone in the coming months.
In the welcome speech of the seminar, Tom Mullarkey, RoSPA's chief executive, promised RoSPA's commitment to the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety, saying: "With 1.3 million people dead in road accidents all over the world World and tens of millions of injured, its role in the UN Decade of Action. "
Traffic accidents are one of the biggest public health and injury prevention problems in the world. The problem is even more acute because the victims are overwhelmingly healthy before their accidents. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than one million people die on the world's roads each year. A WHO 2004 report estimated that about 1.2 million people died and 50 million were injured in Traffic crashes on roads around the world each year and was the leading cause of death among children aged 10-19 years. The report also noted that the problem was more serious in developing countries and that simple prevention measures could halve the number of deaths.
The standard measures used to assess road safety interventions are fatalities and deaths or serious injuries (KSI), generally per billion (109) kilometres of passengers. Countries stuck in the old paradigm of road safety, replacing KSI rates with accident rates - for example, accidents per million miles of vehicle.The speed of the vehicle within human tolerances to avoid serious injury and death is a key objective of modern road design because impact speed affects the severity of injuries to both occupants and pedestrians. For the occupants, Joksch (1993) found that the probability of death of drivers in multiple vehicle accidents increased as the fourth power of impact velocity (often referred to by the mathematical term v ("Delta V"). Are caused by sudden and severe acceleration (or deceleration) This is difficult to measure However, shock reconstruction techniques can estimate the velocity of the vehicle before an accident, so the speed change is used as a substitute This allowed the Swedish Highway Administration to identify the KSI risk curves using actual shock reconstruction data that led to the human tolerances for serious injury and death mentioned above.