Skip to main content

UNECE and partners raise the Road Safety flag in South-Eastern Europe

With someone killed or injured on the world’s road every six seconds, the governments of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe take a step towards changing that statistic this week by working together to find ways to better coordinate and improve road safety.

The two day workshop (15-16 October), which takes place in Belgrade, Serbia is organized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Government of the Republic of Serbia (Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, and Road Traffic Safety Agency), as well as the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) and supported by the World Bank and the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. It brings together a wide range of road safety stakeholders from the public and private sectors. While the focus is on South-East Europe and Western Balkans, experts are coming from the entire UNECE region as well as Australia. 

The purpose of this Workshop is to spearhead action on the ground by providing the participating governments with concrete lessons learned, and showcasing different forms of inter-agency coordination including the vertical (national, regional and local authorities) and horizontal (amongst different ministries and other national stakeholders) approaches in order to create a blueprint to a successful and sustainable road safety policy.
 
The presentations and panel discussions focused on core road safety management issues, such as intergovernmental cooperation, functions of a lead agency, developing a national strategy, setting realistic and long term targets, funding sources and data support systems for monitoring and evaluation.

“In the field of road safety, along with the technical improvements of road infrastructure, we have to put more emphasis on increasing awareness, responsibility and knowledge of traffic among the citizens, in order to reduce the number of accidents," said Imre Kern, State Secretary of the Republic of Serbia’s Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure.

Miodrag Pesut, Chief of the Transport Facilitation and Economics Section of UNECE Transport Division emphasised, "Improving road safety is vital for society and a top priority of the United Nations. UNECE attaches great weight to this effort and has ambitious plans for a series of road safety activities. We need to educate the public, raise awareness, induce action and inspire UNECE countries to accelerate road safety activities if we want to see tangible results in reducing road fatalities, injuries and accidents."

For more information, please visit: http://www.unece.org/trans/roadsafe/belgrade_2014.html
Note to editors
With more than 1.3 million people killed on roads every year, road safety crisis in the world has reached an alarming magnitude.  The Road Safety Workshop was designed to bring real world experience and good practices to the participating governments, and present a complete picture of how road safety can be approached from an efficient, cost effective successful manner.  This includes filling in knowledge gaps about what is necessary to increase road safety, assessing the financial cost, understanding where different government agencies need to coordinate and laying the groundwork for an effective road safety infrastructure. 

If you wish to subscribe to the UNECE Weekly newsletter, please send an email to:  [email protected]

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

Information Unit

Tel.: +41 (0) 22 917 12 34

Email: [email protected]

Reproduction is permitted provided that the source is acknowledged.