Driving home road safety

Richard Meredith and Phil Colley have driven the length of the Asian Highway and across Europe, 16,000 kilometres from Tokyo to London, in an Aston Martin V8 Vantage to raise awareness of the Make Roads Safe campaign. Phil Colley explains how the journey brought home the reality of life – and death – on the roads of Central Asia.

Phil Colley arrives in London.

“They said we couldn’t do it. And sometimes I suspected they might be right. But the truth is we’ve just completed an incredible journey. Most of it has been through the great continent of Asia, along roads that will one day form the currently embryonic Asian Highway – as we’ve discovered there is a long way to go before the project is fully realised. Nonetheless a ribbon of tarmac does indeed stretch all the way from Tokyo to London though for much of the way that ribbon is torn, tattered and crumpled and certainly filled with one helluva lot of potholes. To drive along that road, particularly in a vehicle with only a few inches ground clearance, has been a real and serious challenge. Never once did the car let us down. Leaving Beijing for our nine day crossing of China I remember looking down the road ahead and visualising it taking us all the way to London – in my mind’s eye it sure looked like a long way, and of course half way round the world is in fact how far we have travelled.

At Gangsu province.

To cover that distance and arrive back exactly on schedule has certainly been a feat of

human endurance – we had day after day of really long drives along some crazy roads in incredibly intense heat. In the early stages it was really hard at the end of the day to look at the map on the roof of the car and realise that in terms of our total journey we had barely moved an inch. So it has been tough and challenging, both physically and mentally, but of course it has been a real adventure too and Richard and I both feel enormously privileged to have been able to undertake it and most of all to have driven home safely.

Children in Instanbul hear about the Make Roads Safe campaign.

And ultimately driving home road safety, raising awareness about the growing global epidemic of road deaths, has been what our journey has been all about.

If you travel through Asia these days, and particularly through China, you can’t help noticing that more and more roads are being built and always it seems with cars in mind rather than the people who need to cross them safely. Inevitably this means more and more accidents. What we have seen along the way from Tokyo has been the reality behind many of the statistics that we hear.

Phil and Martin arrive at Istanbul.

Throughout our journey we have been witness to countless accidents, cars and trucks upturned in ditches, small children dodging heavy traffic as they struggle to get to school, and, of course, unless obliged to do so by sensible law enforcement, the truth is that very few people out there, for whatever reason, seem willing to wear their seat belts.
As we entered Turkmenistan I will never forget seeing in the desert twilight the sight of a smashed up Landcruiser, still with the twisted, blooded bodies of four young men inside. The sad fact is that they would probably have lived had they been wearing seat belts. And we met so many people who, when we talked about these issues, would reveal how they had lost a family member to the road.

Richard Meredith speaking at the Press Conference in London.

However, unlike dramatic plane crashes, most of these deaths, each one emotionally and economically devastating to the family involved, happen daily and each crash involves relatively few people, making the problem easy to ignore. And ignoring the problem is exactly what the world’s politicians are doing. With wiser planning and sufficient government investment many, many of these road deaths could be avoided. For their efforts to bring this about the Make Roads Safe campaign is to be highly commended. They need our support.

Throughout our journey I’ve been amazed to watch Richard as he has worked tirelessly to generate press and TV interest in all of the cities and towns we’ve passed through, immediately upon arrival talking hotel managers into contacting their local paper. Most people at the end of an extremely long and exhausting days driving would have gone straight to bed. But not Richard: He’s really put himself out to make our journey a meaningful one: I know the issue of road safety is genuinely close to his heart.”

Related Article: Tokyo to London... in 50 days
Official website: Driving Home Road Safety 2007

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