CALLING FOR SAFER ROAD ENGINEERING
22 May 2006 - Federation of European Motorcyclists' Associations

Thousands of lives and billions of Euros can be saved every year

** European road safety
targets set in 2001 will not be met unless road authorities rise up
to the challenge of absorbing increasing road traffic while offering
safer driving conditions to all road users. The European Commission''s
proposal to offer Member States a toolkit of safety management
procedures is the right way to ensure Europe overcomes today''s
unacceptable patchwork of national standards resulting from decades
of under-investment which needlessly put lives at risk.

As the European Commission itself recently recognised, ''not enough
progress has been made and more effort will be needed, at national
and European level, to achieve the objective of halving the number of
road deaths by 2010''. Ongoing initiatives to improve driver behaviour
and upgrade vehicle safety standards are encouraging and should be
vigorously pursued. But what of safer road engineering?

Numerous deaths and serious injuries on our roads will be prevented
if the European Union lives up to its political, moral and legal
obligation of providing guidance to ensure safety is integrated in
all phases of road planning, design, construction, operation &
maintenance through cost-effective road management practices:

Road safety impact assessments, providing comparative safety
scenarios at the planning stage, Road safety audits, as a systematic
process for checking new road schemes prior to their opening, Road
safety inspections, offering a periodical review of road networks in
operation, Network safety management, to ensure high accident risk
road sections are inventoried and eradicated. Europe has reached a
crossroads as it considers new ways of tackling its unacceptably high
levels of road deaths. Key decisions on how to build a new road and
where to affect maintenance funds are all too often made without a
clear understanding of their safety implications. All categories of
road users - motorists, professional drivers, two-wheelers and
pedestrians - stand to gain from safer road infrastructure. Above
all, Europe''s millions of road users have a right to know to what
safety standards their road networks are operated and what action
plans are being implemented to eradicate dangerous roads.

We the undersigned organisations call for the swift release of a
Directive on Safe Road Management as a part of a new ''safety deal''
linking in a realistic way all the actors of the safety chain, the
drivers, the vehicles, the roads, the policy makers and the citizens
in their common effort to save thousands of needless casualties and
billions of Euros every year.

www.fema.ridersrights.org

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