Research*EU Magazine | Number 42 (May 2015)

Road safety: Towards zero fatalities?

Summary:

From 4 to 10 May, the world will be celebrating the UN’s Global Road Safety Week under the theme ‘Children and road safety’, which follows a 10-year series of resolutions aimed at making roads safer. Some 3 400 people still die on the road every day, which makes it the 9th leading cause of death behind the likes of heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and AIDS. Whilst the EU presents the lowest rate of road traffic injury in the world, things are not looking so good here either. In late March, the European Commission announced its disappointment with the European road statistics for 2014 — only 1% lower than in 2013. 70 Europeans still die on the road every day, and many more are seriously injured. According to Violeta Bulc, EU Commissioner for Transport, these figures should be ‘a wake-up call’, and if governments and industry choose to push the snooze button, the EU could fail to reach its objective of halving road deaths by 2020.

This month’s ‘special’ section covers a handful of projects  on this topic and comprises five articles and four interviews. The projects addressed include self-driving vehicles, which are hoped to revolutionise the way we conceive transportation, as well as innovative safety equipment, driver behaviour monitoring techniques and technologies able to track and recognise vulnerable road users.

This section is followed by our usual insights into biology and medicine, social sciences and humanities, energy and transport, the environment, IT and telecommunications, industrial technologies and food and agriculture, along with a list of upcoming scientific events

Contents:

Industrial Technologies

Health

Energy

Digital Economy

Climate Change and Environment

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