“When I started as a kid, it was very, very dangerous,” he says. “People weren’t surprised that someone died in a race car.”
That world no longer exists. Decades of engineering, regulation and relentless safety work have made a pile-up at 200 mph survivable. “Now everyone would be surprised if someone was injured in a racing car,” says Todt.
Now he wants the same transformation for the trip to school, the motorcycle ride, the delivery man weaving through traffic, because the numbers on normal roads are still the same as they used to be in motor racing.
Millions of dead and injured
Every year 1.2 million people die on the world’s roads. Another 50 million are injured. It is the leading cause of death among children and young people between the ages of 5 and 29, a figure so constant that Todt, now the United Nations Secretary-General’s special envoy for road safety, calls it “a silent pandemic on the roads.”
“Unfortunately, you get used to the situation,” he says.
Next week, world leaders and ministers will gather at United Nations headquarters in New York for a two-day meeting aimed at halving road deaths by 2030, a goal the world is far from reaching.
What makes the crisis unusual, Todt maintains, is that no one lacks solutions.
“Unlike other pandemics, we have the recipes“: education, law enforcement, quality of vehicles, quality of roads, quality of post-accident care,” he states. If legislation on seat belts, helmets, speed limits and drink driving were properly enforced, “we would immediately halve the number of victims on the roads.”
Ninety percent of traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where there is still a long way to go to achieve safer roads, stricter laws and effective enforcement.
Start them young
The Special Envoy starts young. “If you educate a boy or girl, six, seven or eight years old, they will immediately know how to behave,” he says, and, above all, they transmit this to the adults who lead them.
But education without consequences leads nowhere, he warns. “If people know they can behave badly without consequences, there is no reason to change.” Corruption, he adds flatly, “cannot work with” effective law enforcement.
New risks keep coming. Electric bikes, electric scooters and app-based delivery drivers, often paid per order and racing against the clock, sometimes without helmets, have added a new danger to city streets. Autonomous vehicles could eventually help, Todt says, but not soon, and not where the crisis is worst: countries still running on aging vehicle fleets and spotty public transportation.
Jean Todt during his visit to Kyrgyzstan.
talk
Even within his own institution, Todt says road safety struggles to be heard. “Very often I travel, I meet with the UN team and I say, ‘I’m going to be the first to talk about road safety.’ A lot of times I’m right.”
His speech, stripped of jargon, is essentially what transformed his old sport: deaths were never inevitable, and neither are these.
“Prevention is essential,” he says. It took decades for the motorsport world to believe it. He hopes the roads don’t take as much time.
