Speech at First Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety.Part 1
November 19, 2009
Moscow
Первая всемирная министерская конференция по безопасности дорожного движения.
19 ноября 2009 года
Москва
PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues,
I want to welcome you all to Moscow and the first international conference on road safety.
I just asked our Interior Minister how many countries are represented here. 150 countries is a very impressive number. I would like to cordially thank you all for coming to Russia and taking part in this very important event. And I am very pleased that our initiative to hold it has received such enthusiastic response.
I think much has already been said. But there are still some things that I consider important and want to repeat. Until recently, traffic safety was seen by some countries as a purely internal matter, a local problem. Meanwhile, the figures, which Im sure have already been cited in this room, show that it is one of the main problems of international development, the one which requires common strategies and joint action.
Today, when I looked through the materials prepared for our forum, our conference, I once again realized for myself that the numbers are simply amazing depressing if you prefer. Despite the fact that they probably have already been cited today I cannot but repeat them: more than 3,500 people are killed every day in road accidents. Different sources state that every year more than a million people (of which one in five are children) are killed throughout the world. In other words, every year we lose one big city, a metropolis. More than 50 million people are injured and crippled. If we do nothing to reverse this trend, then according to at least these estimates, to the data we have, by 2020 road accidents will become the third most serious threat to human health, along with circulatory system diseases and certain other problems.
It is clear that there is no way one can measure the price of human suffering, but we can measure the damage caused to national economies. This has been calculated at a figure of more than 500 billion US dollars, of which developing economies incur approximately 100 billion US dollars. This is a huge amount of money which naturally could be spent for entirely different purposes, for development, for example.
The main cause of road accidents is traffic violations, that is what traditionally happens on the roads in various countries speeding, drunk driving, simply adopting a disrespectful attitude towards others, and a lack of driving culture. Unfortunately, everything I just referred to exists in our country. We need to create rules at the level of national legislation, rules that would give definite, absolutely clear signals to drivers in all countries. For example, such rules would state that a driver deprived of the right to drive in one country is not able to drive in another one, at least without any prior re-certification.
Along with stepping up repressive measures and increasing fines and penalties, we need to improve training for drivers and pedestrians, provide accident victims with timely quality medical care and, of course, pay special attention to the quality of roads and upgrading road infrastructure.
A special topic for our country, as for many countries (though this is in some way part of a national mentality), is the behaviour of drivers or driving culture. On the other hand, human error must be compensated by the maximum possible security of the vehicles. Recently much has been done in this field and, of course, today's vehicles are significantly different from the one we had of 20, 30 or more than 50 years ago. But it is important to continue to monitor the running order of vehicles and automakers must make greater use of technological innovations. Of course, there is always a choice to be made between the cost of new vehicles and using innovative technology.
http://www.kremlin.ru
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