“When I started as a kid, it was very, very dangerous,” he says. “People weren’t surprised if someone got killed in a race car.”
This world no longer exists. Decades of engineering, regulation and relentless safety work made it possible to survive a 200 mph pileup. “Today, everyone would be surprised if someone was injured in a racing car,” says Mr. Todt.
Today, he wants the same transformation for school runs, motorcycle trips, the delivery man weaving through traffic – because the numbers on ordinary roads are still where car racing was.
Millions dead and injured
1.2 million people are killed every year on the world’s roads. Fifty million more people are injured. It is the leading cause of death among children and young people aged five to 29 – a toll so consistent that Mr Todt, now the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for road safety, calls it a “silent pandemic on the road”.
“Unfortunately, you get used to the situation,” he said.
This week, world leaders and ministers will gather at the 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 being able to achieve.
What makes the crisis unusual, Todt says, is that no one is short of solutions.
“Unlike other pandemics, we have the prescriptions“: education, law enforcement, quality of vehicles, quality of roads, quality of care after an accident,” he says. Properly enforce seat belts, helmets, speed limits and drunk-driving laws, he says, and “we would immediately halve the number of road fatalities.”
Ninety percent of road deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where safer roads, stricter laws and real enforcement are still a long way off.
Start them young
The Special Envoy starts young. “If you educate a young boy or girl of six, seven or eight years old, they will immediately know how to behave,” he says, and, most importantly, they will pass it on 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 continue to arrive. E-bikes, e-scooters and app-based delivery workers, often paid per order and racing against time, sometimes without helmets, have added a new danger to city streets. Self-driving cars could eventually help, Todt says, but not anytime soon, and not where the crisis is deepest: countries that still operate with aging vehicle fleets and spotty public transportation.
Jean Todt during his visit to Kyrgyzstan.
Speak
Even within his own institution, Todt says road safety has difficulty making itself heard. “Very often I travel, I meet the UN team and I say, ‘I’m going to be the first to talk about road safety.’ Very often, I am right.
His pitch, devoid of jargon, is essentially the one that transformed his ancient sport: deaths were never inevitable, and neither were these.
“Prevention is key,” he says. It took decades of racing to believe it. The roads, he hopes, won’t require as much time.
