Each year nearly 1.3 million people (or 3,000 people each day) die as a result of a road traffic collision and more than half of these people are not travelling in a car. Twenty to fifty million more people sustain non-fatal injuries, a major cause of disability worldwide. Ninety per cent of road traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, which account for less than half the world’s registered vehicle fleet. Road traffic injuries are among the three leading causes of death for people between 5 and 44 years of age. Unless immediate and effective action is taken, road traffic injuries are predicted to become the fifth leading cause of death in the world, causing an estimated 2.4 million deaths each year.
REAAA Governing Council agreed that the development of a Compendium on Good Practices: Road Safety – Make it Happen would be one way for REAAA to make a positive response to this global challenge. As a result, a workshop addressing this topic was conducted during the 9th Heads of Road Authorities (HORA) meeting, held in Kuala Lumpur in April 2010. The outcome of this workshop was a Table of Contents and a work program for the delivery of the Compendium.
This Compendium on Good Practices: Road Safety – Make it Happen commences with an overview of the Decade of Action (2011-2020). This is followed by a compilation of accident statistics for each country in the region commencing from the year 2001 up to, depending on the availability of data, 2010 (2011 data is available from Indonesia).
A series of case studies addressing the issues identified during the workshop as relevant to the topic is then presented. Each country was asked to address two or three of these issues and the resulting responses have been condensed into this Compendium.