Road Safety Awards: Commission rewards initiatives in Greece, France, Portugal, Romania and Sweden

Recently, annual road safety statistics published by the European Commission showed that after two years of stagnation, 2016 brought a positive turn by reducing road fatalities on EU roads by 2% compared to the previous year. Even though European roads remain the safest in the world, there are still 25 500 people a year losing their lives in road crashes and about 135 000 sustaining serious road traffic injuries.

The Awards are part of the European Road Safety Charter, launched by the Commission in 2004, the largest civil society platform on road safety in Europe. Today it includes more than 3 400 signatories, most of them with concrete road safety action plans.

The urban award went to the city of Martigues.

The campaign 'Street code for seniors' of the municipality of Martigues aims to raise awareness of seniors on their risks on the road. The general objective is to reduce the number of fatalities and road traffic injuries affecting elderly road users. In parallel, the initiative aims to gather statistics and information on accident scenarios specific to elderly road users, to raise awareness on their physiological limits and the influence of psychotropic substances, and to refresh their knowledge on traffic rules. The project was rewarded for improving the safety of a particularly vulnerable group of road users: the elderly in road traffic. An additional merit of this comprehensive educational programme is to combine successfully road safety concerns with sustainable mobility while improving the quality of life of the targeted community.

http://www.ville-martigues.fr