Advocating Global Road Safety

Abstract

The spate of youth road fatalities that we have seen in New South Wales in the last quarter of 2006 represents tragedies that no community should have to bear. These are made all the more tragic to those of us who know how these kinds of events can be prevented. There are evidence based solutions. In Australia we have influenced significant change in community and political attitudes in favour of road safety in recent times. But somehow, we as a road safety “profession” have not entirely convinced the global – or even the Australian community – that it is best to choose safety intervention over “personal freedom” or other socioeconomic benefits. Within the Australasian College of Road Safety, we have debated to what degree we should be a community advocate versus a professional support organisation. For a while, many of us took the conservative view that we should work towards a strengthening of our members' skills and knowledge before we embark on public advocacy. This has been a sensible approach. But increasingly, we are finding a role in ‘ advising’ community leaders on some key issues. We have established a series of policy positions on major road safety issues based on our collective knowledge base. Beyond this we have organised seminars and forums for public discussion as well as responded to questions by media organisations.