When was the last time you heard about road safety? If you don’t remember, it’s not just the war and the pandemic. In Italy, the topic has gone out of fashion – if it ever was – for at least a decade. In the same period, controls dropped throughout Europe: this was denounced by a report from the ETSC (European transport safety council, also financed by the EU Commission and Parliament and linked to national authorities), published on 15 March.
On the other hand, the EU has failed for the second consecutive decade the goal of halving road deaths set at the beginning of the century (-50% every ten years): the 2010-2019 period ended with a -23.66% , less than half of the planned decline. In 2020 the trend has improved, but it is probably due to the lockdowns for Covid. The cumulative figure since 2000 is -63.40%, against a target of -75%. By now the feeling is that, in order to aim to achieve the substantial zeroing planned for 2050, the States are relying above all on technology. Which, however, is far from expressing its full potential.
The limits of technology
In fact, technology needs to take over from man completely or almost, leading “her” (which, moreover, risks having a price in terms of privacy – and vulnerability to breakdowns and hacker attacks that could cause accidents or block roads like today can happen for airplanes and trains). But it will take decades: before a widespread diffusion of autonomous driving, on the roads there will be a long (and problematic) period of coexistence between human drivers and artificial intelligence.
In the meantime, the technology will continue to be present mainly in automatic infringement checks. First of all, those on speed, which proliferate: in 21 out of 28 countries the number of fines increased from 2010 to 2019 (graph above). Of course, in the long run it drops, due to the deterrent effect of the controls. But various local studies cited by the ETSC show that where there are none the effect diminishes.
Furthermore, speeding – together with the passage with a red light – is the only offense relevant to safety that can be ascertained automatically. The others that worry experts are distraction (especially from smartphone use and the like) and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Here the automated technology does not count: a large deployment of patrols is needed, which dissuades from committing infractions and compensates for the fact that the “productivity” of checks carried out by agents is much lower than in automatic checks.