ROMA – Fewer cars on the road, fewer accidents. This is the incontrovertible data that attests that in 2020, due to the restrictions due to the pandemic, accidents on the roads of the Old Continent have significantly decreased. To be precise, last year in the European Union there were about 4,000 fewer road deaths than in 2019. A reduction of 17 percent that is currently unprecedented.
The new European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) report, published in recent days also explains that in the period 2010-2020, in Europe, the decrease in road accident victims was 37%, with a saving of over 56 thousand lives (56,305) and 156 billion euros in social costs. Among the EU countries, only Greece – with a reduction of 54% – exceeded the European target of halving the number of road deaths by 2020. Italy and nine other countries – Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark , Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Hungary – achieved a decrease of around 37%. The countries in which, in the last ten years, progress has been the least are the Netherlands (-5%) and the United Kingdom (-14%).
“Road safety is a public health problem”, explains Antonio Avenoso, General Manager of ETSC. “Covid has killed 3.5 million people around the world. In the last decade, at least 13 million people have died on the roads of our planet. The extraordinary and necessary global response to the Covid pandemic has shown how policy makers and society as a whole can act when many people are working towards a common goal. Can we apply the same principle to the challenges of road safety? ” (fp)
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