Additional measures required
Halving the number of road casualties does not seem feasible in the coming years. This is the conclusion of the Road Safety Research Foundation (SWOV) based on new forecasts. The organization calls the halving, an ambition of the cabinet, ‘out of reach’.
The government has set itself the goal of halving the number of road casualties by 2030. In 2019, the last year before corona, 661 people in the Netherlands died in traffic. In the most favorable scenario, SWOV expects that there will be a total of 480 in 2030, so still 72 percent of it. The prognosis for the number of serious road injuries shows, in the best-case scenario, even a sharp increase, from 6,900 in 2019 to 8,400 in 2030. In the worst-case scenario, both the number of road fatalities and serious injuries will rise in 2030.
In the study, SWOV has calculated with two scenarios. These must predict how the casualty numbers will develop up to 2030. The first scenario assumes that the trend will continue during the corona years, when fewer people took to the road, resulting in fewer casualties. The second, worst-case scenario, is a situation in which road safety will develop again in the coming years as it did before the corona crisis.
Additional measures
In order to arrive at a more favorable development, extra security measures can be taken. One of them, according to SWOV, is a reduction of the maximum speed in built-up areas to 30 km/h. SWOV also mentions cyclists wearing helmets and automatic speed limiters on cars as possible measures.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl