CONASET participates in World Road Safety Conference and signs declaration to reduce traffic fatalities by 2030
Over 1,700 participants from approximately 140 countries met in Stockholm at the world’s most important conference on road safety. CONASET participated actively in the various event modules.
Chile’s National Road Safety Commission (CONASET) Executive Secretary Johanna Vollrath and Chile’s Ambassador to Sweden, Hernán Bascuñán, participated in the 3rd Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety 2020 in Stockholm. The meeting, which was organized by Sweden’s Infrastructure Ministry, focused on the status quo of road safety and encouraged participating countries to commit to strengthening prevention and reducing traffic accidents.
South America had a strong presence at the event, including the participation of the Transportation Ministers of Colombia and Ecuador and the Transportation Vice Ministers of Argentina and Costa Rica. Attendees signed the “Stockholm Declaration,” an important document that reaffirms the goal of reducing the number of deaths from traffic accidents by 50% by the year 2030.
“At the National Road Safety Commission, we believe that the only way to reduce the number of traffic-related deaths in Chile is to include safe mobility as a value in public policies and to take steps to reduce speeding, which has been the main cause of such deaths over the past few years. This points to the need for advanced technology in our streets. We are calling for progress to be made on the CATI bill, which proposes the creation of an Automated Traffic Violations Center and would install adequately marked radar systems in areas in which many accidents have occurred. The goal is to encourage drivers to slow down before they are ticketed,” said CONASET Executive Secretary Johanna Vollrath.
The most important points presented at this World Conference included the conceptual shift from road safety to safe mobility, which seeks to make traffic safety a fundamental value in transportation rather than just a term of intervention.
Gender is another key issue in this area. Men die in traffic accidents much more frequently than women, which means that the latter must shoulder the burden that this creates for the family. Furthermore, women view safety as a key factor, which is why it is important for them to get involved in transportation issues.
Finally, attendees discussed the possibility of making safe mobility a human right in order to position the topic on the international agenda and encourage governments to become more involved with it.
The conference also included the 2nd World Youth Assembly for Road Safety, which was attended by Fundación Emilia’s Andrea Schifferly. It represents a strong commitment on the part of young people at the global level to prevent millions of lives from being lost in traffic accidents over the next decade.