Robert Zoellick
Michelle Yeoh
Seven multilateral development banks have announced a joint initiative to improve road safety and stem rising road deaths and injuries in developing countries, and meet targets of the UN Decade for Road Safety 2011-2020.
Make Roads Safe ambassador Michelle Yeoh joined World Bank President Robert Zoellick and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington DC to mark the launch of the ‘Multilateral Development Banks’ Road Safety Initiative’. The new initiative follows the ‘Joint Statement’ on road safety by the seven banks in November 2009 committing to a coordinated response to road deaths and injuries, not least through improving safety measures in road infrastructure projects funded by the banks and building institutional capacity within countries.
President Zoellick of the World Bank urged countries to invest in road safety, and called on donors to provide funds through the new initiative. Both financing and capacity-building in developing countries are needed, he said, to meet the goals of the UN Decade. The goal is to reduce the forecast 2020 level of road deaths by 50 per cent, from 1.9 million to under one million a year. Achieving the 2020 target could save up to five million lives and prevent 50 million serious injuries.
Robert Zoellick said: “In developed countries, road fatalities are going down but in developing countries they are surging because of increased road building, motor vehicles and dangerous traffic mixes that pit vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, against a growing tide of cars and trucks. Unless well-targeted measures are taken, there will be an escalating death toll on the roads in poor countries, which would be a terrible tragedy. We must make road safety a more urgent priority in the development assistance provided by multilateral development banks for road projects. Otherwise, the cost to developing countries is too great. We must deliver the needed resources to create transformational change for safety.”
Partners of the Multilateral Development Banks’ Road Safety Initiative include the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Islamic Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the World Bank. The initiative calls for an integrated Safe System approach which promotes shared responsibility for ensuring safe mobility, and starts with countries naming a lead agency to direct a national road safety strategy. The initiative has been coordinated by the Global Road Safety Facility.
In her speech to the meeting, Michelle Yeoh said: Our Make Roads Safe campaign has consistently called on the multilateral development banks to make road safety a greater priority, to use your vast lending capacity as a force for good. For far too long, roads have been planned and built with one vital element forgotten: the people they should be designed to serve. The joint statement on road safety published by the World Bank, the IDB and the other leading banks in 2009 was a powerful and unequivocal pledge to at last make road safety a priority. And I very much hope that the initiative you're launching here today will soon see this pledge resulting in real action that will save lives.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said: “…we won’t be able to save lives on a large scale unless countries start building safe roads. And let’s be clear: I’m not talking simply about new roads. Countries will be building roads no matter what, but what we really need is to make sure that these new roads are safe roads. It can cost a little bit more, but the cost of treating people who are injured, the impact on the economies of these countries, makes these investments give you a return virtually right away.”