Kyiv Must Start Addressing Systemic Road Fatality Problems

We all read the news.

Some news we read calmly, very little of it brings a smile, and some news makes us want to look away and forget it. These are the headlines: a child died in a road accident, people died in a road accident, and a drunk driver fled the scene, and so on.

Yes, most people can afford to shut themselves off from news they do not want to see, news that causes pain! Officials, however, must look into it, read, plan and act.

After all, if people are dying on our roads, it means something in the state is not working properly.

Last year, the Norwegian capital Oslo achieved the goal of zero road deaths. Vision Zero — a Swedish concept aimed at reducing road traffic deaths to zero.

Finally, the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) began talking about this. Maksym Bakhmatov and Dmytro Zolotukhin gathered the police, the Traffic Organization Center, the Department of Transport Infrastructure, people's deputies, public activists and others involved in road safety to discuss the concept of a safe city.

The main goal of the meeting was not simply to discuss road accident statistics and road deaths, and how bad everything is here, but to outline a clear action plan of what needs to be done to make things better.

Our goal should not sound like “reduce road deaths to a certain number.” Our goal should be: zero road deaths, as happens in Oslo.

In May 2019, the city target program for improving the organization and safety of road traffic in Kyiv was approved. Those responsible for implementing the target program discussed how to improve it. They outlined the changes needed to improve traffic safety:

First, pay attention to performance evaluations of government agencies.

– The patrol police should focus not on the number of fines, but on preventing accidents and reducing the number of injured and killed. They should work not where they can fine the most drivers, but in areas where the most accidents occur.

– The medical care system must reduce the ratio between injured and killed in road accidents. Do you know what the golden hour is? There is the so-called “golden hour,” the time within which a victim must reach hospital, which significantly reduces road crash mortality.

– The education system must teach children and parents about traffic safety. Do you have traffic safety lessons at your school?

Second, make a number of changes to the legal framework. For example:

– introduce into legislation the concept of aggressive driving on the road and provide fines for this violation;

– allow the use of dashcam recordings to punish violators. On this basis, one could even create a driver community for traffic safety;

Third, improve the system of medical care for victims of road accidents; ensure rehabilitation for victims. It is also necessary to collect statistics tracking the fate of road accident victims: the number who die in hospitals from injuries, the number who become disabled, the length of sick leave, and so on. These indicators significantly affect the economic aspects of traffic safety.

Fourth, collect accurate statistics on what happens on our roads using Big Data technologies that rely on non-personalized data from mobile operators. The movement of a single mobile phone across the city can provide a detailed picture of transport and pedestrian flows.

What ideas do you have, what do you think should be changed and why in legislation on this topic?

Safety and human life must be real priorities for us.