Shifting Out of Neutral: A New Approach to Global Road Safety

On April 14, 2004, the United Nations dedicated "World Health Day" to improving global road safety. In explaining the need to focus the world's attention on road safety, Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that "World Health Day is an occasion for us to highlight the [road safety] problem and ... to underscore the fact [that crashes] are avoidable, they are not just accidents, they are human errors which [,] with proper governmental policy[,] can be dealt with." Just what the "proper governmental policy" should be, however, requires an understanding of the factors associated with vehicle crashes. After examining these factors, the Author discusses international responses to date and recommends that, as an initial step, countries seeking to improve road safety create a single governmental agency that would function similarly to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).