Rethinking highway safety
    By Jean-Louis Andreani
    Le Monde

    Tuesday 14 August 2007

    July's poor statistics for highway safety, which close a bad first semester (1.8 percent more deaths), confirm the fragility of the improvement observed since the [French] government decided to respond to excessive speed with fixed radar emplacements. The lives saved are very real: 42.9 percent fewer killed between 2001 and 2006. However, at the level of drivers' behavior, everything is taking place as though this were only a partial - even a trompe l'oeil - success.

    In fact, the deterioration which followed the spectacular improvement in the beginning shows that the main lever in calmer driving is less awareness of the risks than fear of the cop or his automatic substitute. When that effect is diluted, speed increases again, and accidents also: experimental proof that no progress has been made in the other road-risk factors.

    All the actors in highway safety share the responsibility. The State, long miserly in posting police on the roads, is also responsible for the condition of the major infrastructures. Moreover, the official statistic of 50 black spots inventoried after the Polish bus accident in the Is re July 22, could give a too-optimistic picture of the state of the network.

    In fact, it's not just about the dangers linked to a steep incline. Many other accident-producing sites are sprinkled along the roads, reduced in a sometimes rather slow manner. Perhaps the transfer of some parts of the former national highway to the d partements [French local governments] will lead to an improvement, at the price of additional spending by the local governments.

    On the side of drivers, apart from speed, irresponsibility, lack of awareness, and indifference to others hold a central position. Now, to a certain extent, the road is a reflection of life. At the heart of a society where the other is ever more often considered to be of negligible consequence, perceived as a pain, even as a potential target of aggressive behavior, it is hard to see how dangerous driving could subside. The loss of benchmarks, the desocialization of part of the population - partly among youth - has direct consequences on attitudes at the wheel. Some everyday behavior by drivers with the "A" on the rear window that indicates a recent license sends chills down the spine. Without even mentioning the alarming current statistics on the number of drivers without a license, given the difficulty of obtaining the precious pink paper. Nor driving under the influence of drugs - among all age groups - which worries professionals more and more at the same time as driving while drunk is not in decline.

    Posing the question of highway safety must also involve dealing with the crucial problem of trucks. Every driver on the auto route is confronted, each day more so, with agonizing "walls of trucks," even though those roads remain safer than national roads. Although truck drivers involved in accidents are less often drunk than automobile drivers, apart from the fact that a single wrecked truck can block an auto route and thousands of automobile drivers for several hours, these crashes are more deadly: with a little over 6 percent of the kilometers traveled (2006 statistics), the "big rigs" account for 9.6 percent of the vehicles involved in fatal accidents. Some 14.5 percent of those killed are in an accident with a heavy rig. For the most part, these victims are not the occupants of trucks.

    Yet in France, as in the European Union as a whole, the road's share of freight transport keeps on growing: for France, the figure has gone from 75.3 percent in 1994 to 80.5 percent in 2005 (Eurostat statistics). To allow the number of heavy trucks launched on the auto route to grow this way without restraint is madness, from the point of view of highway safety as well as from the perspective of the fight against pollution and global warming.

    Reverse the Tendency

    It is urgent to reverse the tendency. The commissioning scheduled for the beginning of July and put off until September 10 of the longest European piggyback rail line, between Perpignan and Luxembourg, fits with this concern. However, supposing that the political will exists, alternatives to the road (rail, European waterways, "sea highways") will have trouble developing as long as a decisive stage is not reached: one day or another, the EU will end up acknowledging that road transporters and their clients must integrate part of the costs they generate into their profitability calculations: costs such as wear and tear on the infrastructure, greenhouse gases, road insecurity.... That day, the economic advantage will change sides in a much clearer fashion.

    At present, the French authorities, and, if possible, the European authorities should consider generalizing the prohibition against heavy trucks passing on the auto route. That prohibition, experimental in France and limited to little chunks of road, has just come into force permanently for a large part of the Luxemburg auto route network - yes, limited to a scant 125 kilometers. But there also, with a little political courage, the principle could be adopted on a large scale, even if it necessitates significant investments to accompany that measure with passing zones at regular intervals to allow overtaking the slowest vehicles.

    At a time when international traffic in France is increasing five times faster than domestic transit to reach 23 percent of the total, Europe should also more closely concern itself with drivers' labor conditions. The road is the domain where the pressure of competition, differences in legislation, mentalities and in awareness of the security stakes, burst into our daily routine, sometimes in a deadly way. Now, all this, or practically all, comes down on professional international drivers, whose lot is often little to be envied.

    In certain countries of enlarged Europe, they are the veritable modern convicts, overexploited and underpaid. The Polish bus accident, moreover, appears to be a textbook case: a driver, young and not much-trained (killed with twenty-five pilgrims), an employer sanctioned since the accident for failure to respect the legal limits on time at the wheel....

    highway safety is undoubtedly an endless battle. But the chances of victory would be greater if the fight were conducted coherently on all fronts. And not by losing back on one side what we have won on another. Preserving life on the road is also improving life itself.