Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-07-01-Speech-1-113-000"
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"en.20130701.17.1-113-000"2
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"Mr President, on behalf of the Committee on Transport and Tourism, I welcome this oral question which gives us the opportunity to revisit the important issue of road safety. Some Members may trivialise road safety but, armpits or not, I am glad to say that – thankfully – the majority of my committee take it far more seriously.
Can I ask the Commission when it will set a target to reduce serious injuries by 2020 and – equally important – how will it make sure that Member States are working towards that target?
What accompanying measures and initiatives will the Commission put forward to support tackling serious injuries, and what measures can specifically be put in place to help more vulnerable road users such as cyclists, pedestrians and young children?
Can the Commission also indicate to us the importance of road surfaces and the lack of maintenance that is now rife in Member States, and what significant effect that has on road accidents?
You will see from the motion for a resolution tabled by the committee as a follow-up to the oral question that we already have a few ideas on this. Given the continued leadership we hope to see from the European Commission on road safety, I would like to hear how it plans to follow up on the common definition of serious injuries.
As you know, Commissioner, the European Parliament adopted a road safety report back in 2011 pushing for ambitious EU targets to be set in reducing the number of needless accidents on our roads by 2020. We know that the setting of targets is key to pushing national, regional and local authorities to put in place specific measures to actually tackle the problems that we face on our roads. Specific targets on road safety have proved successful in raising the level of ambition and achieving effective implementation of road safety policies at national and local level.
While there is no doubt that specific measures and initiatives can best be tailored and adapted at national and local level, EU leadership in this area has proved successful in the past in getting Member States to recognise the seriousness of the problem.
While Parliament strongly welcomed at the time the commitment to cut 50% of road deaths by 2020, we also knew that this was only partly addressing the road safety problem.
Deaths are only one measure of the magnitude of road accident problems. Road deaths have been declining, in some part due to the improvements in medical care. As a result, non-fatal injuries are increasing. I think one-and-a-half million people are reported to be injured every year on EU roads, with 300[nbsp ]000 of those reported to be seriously injured.
I fail to understand how we can continue to be so complacent about these figures: there seems to be simply an unacceptable complacency when it comes to road safety. If aviation or our railways had the accident figures that road transport has, there would be a public outcry.
Across Europe there seems to be a general acceptance or refusal to acknowledge the danger we face as road users, so the more we can do to address this issue the better. Now is the time for us to stop taking a back seat and to stop pretending that a problem is not there.
In the absence of a common definition across the EU for serious injuries, we were not able to set a target for local, regional and national authorities to work towards. That is why we so welcome the recent progress report from the Commission which announces a common definition of serious injuries and a system of collecting data.
However, we want to ensure that the important foundations laid in Dieter-Lebrecht Koch’s report are fully followed through. Parliament requested not only that the Commission came up with a common definition quickly but that, once established, an ambitious target would be set for cutting down on serious injuries in road accidents."@en1
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