ETSC has launched the PIN Annual Report at the PIN Annual Conference, which took place in Brussels on Monday 17th of June 2013. There have been 2,661 fewer road deaths in 2012 than in 2011 in the EU as a whole. Out of the 31 countries monitored by the PIN Programme, 27 registered a drop in the number of road deaths in 2012 compared to 2011. Frontrunners are Malta and Cyprus followed by Israel and Denmark, but road deaths increased in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Romania. Greece, the UK and Slovakia achieved better than EU average reductions. The 2013 PIN Award was presented to Denmark for its outstanding efforts to improve road safety. For the EU to be reaching the 2020 target through constant annual progress, another 600 deaths would have had to be saved over the 2011- 2012 period.

ETSC published recently a PIN Flash concerning the rate of collisions between men and women. Just under 30.400 people were killed in 2011 in the EU27 in road collisions, approximately 7.200 females and 23.200 males. Females account for 51% of the total EU population but only 24% of road deaths. This percentage has changed by only one percentage point since 2001, but the reduction in female deaths since then has been four percentage points greater than the reduction in male deaths. Males account for 76% of people killed on the roads in the EU in 2011. Males have more than three times the death rate of females on the roads in the EU. 

The International Conference ‘Living and Walking in Cities’, organised by the Università degli Studi di Brescia and the Friendly City Study Center (CeSCAm) took place on 13-14 June in Brescia, with the participation of more than 100 experts in the fields. Twenty years after the first Road Safety Forum, held in Brescia in June 1993, the Conference came back to the issues relating to the vulnerable users’ road safety. CeSCAm Director, Professor Roberto Busi stated that there is an urgent need to incorporate mobility and safety needs of walking and cycling in the continuous urban planning process. 

NTUA Professor George Yannis presented the “State of the Art on Road Safety“, highlighting basic facts on urban road safety, the needs for road safety knowledge, the key road safety research priorities and the fundamental urban road safety choices to be made by citizens and Authorities in the European cities. 

The European Commission adopted two proposals to help mitigate the consequences of serious road accidents across the EU. By October 2015, cars will automatically call emergency services in case of a serious crash. The “eCall” system automatically dials 112 – Europe’s single emergency number – in the event of a serious accident. It communicates the vehicle’s location to emergency services, even if the driver is unconscious or unable to make a phone call. It is estimated that it could save up to 2.500 lives a year (MEMO/13/547). 

The Twenty-third Meeting of the European Neurological Society, organised by the Spanish Society of Neurology, took place on 8-11 June in Barcelona.   NTUA presentation concerned “Neuropsychological parameters associated with driver distraction in a driving simulator experiment: presentation of methodology and preliminary findings”.   

The ceremony for the 2013 Environmental Sensitivity Awards OIKOPOLIS 2013, organised by ECOCITY took place on June 5th, 2013, in Athens. The OIKOPOLIS awards aim to promote general environmental awareness and develop social participation of enterprises, associations and institutions to undertake or support actions for the environment. NTUA Associate Professor George Yannis was awarded for his overall scientific work on sustainable urban mobility, including his extensive work on road safety.  He underlined that “urban mobility and safety are primary components of the urban environment and that the transportation engineers in Greece persist fighting to convincing authorities and citizens for the necessary sustainable mobility and safety solutions in the Greek cities”.  

ETSC’s expectations of the European Commission’s upcoming urban mobility package (that will be presented in late 2013), is that it will lay out measures that will contribute to reducing road deaths by 50% by 2020 in urban areas. Transport safety should be considered as an essential component of sustainable mobility and mobility planning. In attempting to secure change in urban mobility patterns, road safety can be regarded as a critical challenge, largely because of the social and economic cost of road collisions. Real and perceived safety can have a profound effect on modal choice especially in terms of the most sustainable modes of travel – walking and cycling and ability to access public transport. ETSC strongly recommends that safety should be integrated not only into the development of Urban Mobility Plans, but also into proposed Urban Mobility Audits and Guidelines and be reflected in common targets. 

The Global Road Safety Partnership Annual Report has recently been published. The report summarises in brief the actions taken by the Global Road Safety Partnership during the year 2012 to encourage and to increase road safety efforts within the framework of the Decade of Action and to build and share knowledge to achieve a reduction in road crash death and injury.

Make Roads Safe, the campaign for global road safety issued the Report Safe Roads for All, a post-2015 agenda for health and development. This is the new report from the Commission for Global Road Safety, urging a road safety target to be included in the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

The International Transport Forum (ITF/OECD) published a leaflet on Cycling Safety. This leaflet presents preliminary 2012 data for more than a dozen selected transport indicators as well as total import and export values for ITF member countries. It also presents graphs and a short analysis of the transport activity in the global economic context highlighting the main changes over the previous year. 

The final SOL conference on “Comprehensive road safety strategy for Central Europe” organised by the Agency of East Lombardy for Transport and Logistics (ALOT) took place on May 27th, 2013 in Brussels. The conference highlighted the undertaken actions and the results, including the SOL Road Safety Guidelines, which were produced during the project SOL – Save Our Lives, cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and carried out within the framework of the European Programme of Territorial Cooperation “Central Europe“.

NTUA Professor George Yannis presented “ROSEE – Road Safety Policies and Measures in South East European Regions“. 

The International Road Traffic and Accident Database (IRTAD) of the International Transport Forum (ITF/OECD) published the Annual Report 2013, which comprises a synthesis of the main trends and road safety indicators for the year 2011 and preliminary data for the year 2012. It presents longer-term trends in order to better understand the developments taking place in the different countries. 2012 will mark a record year, with figures showing the lowest fatalities on record for most OECD-IRTAD countries, however, there is still a long way to go in order to achieve the 2020 UN Decade of Action target, which is to reduce by 50% the expected number of fatalities worldwide. Moreover, a report activity of the IRTAD Group summarising the activities of the Group and detailed reports from 32 countries are presented. NTUA has contributed to the detailed report for Greece.

A large road safety campaign organised by EFTHYTA Rhodes took place on May 19th, 2013 in Rhodes island in Greece, with main message: I am walking for safe roads for all.  People walked along the city center passing the message “We walk for life ….”.  Mrs Eleni Karydi, Head of EFTHITA Rhodes called citizens, Authorities and all stakeholders of Rhodes to persist fighting for safer roads with less accidents.  

A new special issue on road safety of the Journal of Transport and Shipping has recently been published, coordinated by Co-Editors John Karkazis & Amalia Polydoropoulou, Professors at the Department of Shipping, Trade and Transport of the University of the Aegean.  NTUA contributions to this special issue concerned: ‘Driver distraction and road safety in Greece and internationally‘ and ‘Macroscopic traffic safety data analysis and prediction‘.

The Civil Engineering School of the National Technical University of Athens was ranked 25th among all Civil Engineering Schools worldwide and 7th in Europe. This ranking is produced by the QS Organisation based on selected criteria: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), citations per faculty by scopus (20%), faculty student ratio (20%), proportion of international students and faculty (10%). NTUA road safetyactivities have contributed to this ranking. Professor John Golias, Dean of the Civil Engineering School said that this great improvement is the result of the systematic and collective efforts of all Faculty members for academic and research excellence. 

The first ever in the world Road Safety Flashmob was organised on Friday May 10th, 2013 in Athens by the Road Safety Institute (I.O.AS.) – RSI “Panos Mylonas”, with the support of the European Commission and the European Youth Forum. The event took place in Syntagma square, the most central square of Athens, during the UN Global Road Safety Week (6-12 May 2013) for the promotion of road safety through the message “Stop road crashes”. IOAS President, Mrs Vasiliki Danelli-Mylonain a recent speech during the UN Global Road Safety Week stressed the importance of road safety campaigns: “Together we can make it loud, for our friends, our colleagues, our fellow citizens, our politicians”. 

A paper titled ‘Investigation of the Impact of Low Cost Engineering Measures on Road Safety in Urban Areas‘ co-authored by G.Yannis, A.Kondyli and X.Georgopoulou is now published in International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion. This paper investigates the impact of low cost traffic engineering measures (LCTEMs) on the improvement of road safety in urban areas. A number of such measures were considered, such as speed humps, woonerfs, raised intersections and other traffic calming measures, which have been implemented on one-way, one-lane roads in the Municipality of Neo Psychiko in the Greater Athens Area. The application of the methodology showed that the total number of crashes presented a statistically significant reduction, which can be possibly attributed to the introduction of LCTEMs.  

During the 5th European Road Safety Day on May 6th, 2013 organised by the European Commission, a conference dedicated to reducing pedestrian fatalities in urban areas was held in Brussels. Commission Vice-President Siim Kallas said: “The EU has an outstanding road safety record in global comparison. But every death is one too many. Pedestrians and cyclists are facing the biggest risks in urban areas. And these risks are likely to increase rather than decrease with ever rising traffic volumes in our growing cities. This is why we are addressing this issue pro-actively on the occasion of the European Road Safety Day and the UN Global Road Safety Week“. 

At this Conference, the Commission’s work on several measures specifically linked to the safety of vulnerable road users and urban road safety have been demonstrated together with key presentations by road safety experts and representatives of the major international road-safety organisations.

The 2012 Edition of the EU Road Safety Basic Fact Sheets is now available at the DaCoTA Road Safety Knowledge System as developed through a common methodology by the EU co-funded research projects DaCoTA and SafetyNet, within the framework of developing and enhancing the European Road Safety Observatory. The EU Road Safety Basic Fact Sheets are based on data from the CARE Database and consist of summary and cross-country comparative tables, figures and maps on key road safety topics for which data are available. The EU Road Safety Basic Fact Sheets cover the following topics: – Road user and vehicle: Children (aged <15), Youngsters (aged 15-17), Young people (aged 18-24),Elderly (aged >64), Pedestrians, Cyclists, Motorcycles and mopeds, Car occupants, Heavy goods vehicles and buses, Gender. – Road environment: Motorways, Junctions, Urban areas, Roads outside urban areas,  Seasonality, Single vehicle accidents. -General: Main figures.

The President of the Hellenic Republic Mr. Karolos Papoulias has received on April 22nd, 2013 the Members of the Road Safety Inter-Ministry Committee and discussed and adopted a series of necessary measures of each Ministry for the improvement of road safety in Greece. The Chairman of the Inter-Ministry Committee Mr. Kostis Hatzidakis, Minister of Development and Infrastructure stressed the importance of theimplementation of the national strategic plan and the enhancement of the Secretariat of the Inter-Ministry Committee. NTUA Professor George Kanellaidis pointed out the key messages of the national road safety strategic plan 2011-2020 prepared by NTUA: development of road safety culture, coordination and efficient implementation and monitoring of the road safety measures. 

Interesting findings on attitudes and self reported behaviour of the European drivers towards road traffic risk is now available at the DaCoTA Road Safety Knowledge System, developed by the EU co-financed projectDaCoTA. These Tables summarise basic results from the Pan-European SARTRE surveys on Social Attitudes to Road Traffic Risk in Europe (1991, 1996, 2003, 2010). Focus is given to the most risky traffic offences like Speeding, Alcohol, Seat belt wearing, Tailgating, Driving through amber and Overtaking.

The good practice manual, titled ‘Pedestrian Safety: A road safety manual for decision-makers and practitioners’jointly prepared by GRSP, WHO, the FIA Foundation and the World Bank, is now available on the website of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration. Each year, more than 270.000 pedestrians lose their lives on the world’s roads. Globally, pedestrians constitute 22% of all road traffic fatalities, and in some countries this proportion is as high as two thirds of all road traffic deaths.The manual stresses the importance of a comprehensive, holistic approach that includes enforcement, engineering and education. 

According to the ELSTAT provisional data for 2012, road fatalities in Greece have decreased by 30% since 2009, whereas serious injuries decreased by 17%. The rate fatalities per number of vehicles has decreased the same period by 31% as the vehicle fleet showed a marginal increase of just 2%. This rate is still high in comparison to the other EU countries, demonstrating the important potential for road casualty decrease in Greece if road safety measures are systematically implemented. The recent deep economic crisis is a major factor which might explain this significant decrease in road fatalities in Greece. 

In April 2013, ETSC published a PIN Flash concerning collisions involving an HGV, a bus or a coach. In the European Union 4,254 people lost their lives in collisions involving heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) in 2011, 3,999 in collisions involving light goods vehicles (LGVs) – goods vehicles with a maximum permitted weight below 3.5 tonnes – and 722 in collisions involving a bus, coach or trolleybus, totalling 29% of the overall number of road deaths recorded in 2011. The number of road deaths in collisions with HGVs has dropped in all the PIN countries, Latvia leading the EU countries with an average annual reduction of 14.7% per year, a steeper reduction than the one in the total number of road deaths. 

The Long Short Walk is a fun activity with a serious aim, it is part of the Zenani Campaign and is in support of UN Global Road Safety week on 6-12 May 2013, themed around pedestrian safety. The Second UN Global Road Safety Week from 6-12 May 2013 is led by the World Health Organization, UN regional commissions and members of the UN Road Safety Collaboration. The week coincides with the second anniversary of the Decade of Action for Road Safety. In support of UN Global Road Safety Week The Long Short Walk aims to bring together people and groups from around the world to call for action to protect pedestrians.