The High Council for Traffic and Road Safety gives the go-ahead to the Road Safety Strategy 2030

The Minister for Home Affairs, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, chaired a plenary session of the High Council for Traffic and Road Safety that, among other items on the agenda, approved the Road Safety Strategy 2030, where Pere Navarro, the Director General of Traffic, presented the main lines.

During the plenary session, held this year in person in the auditorium of the National Institute for Health and Safety at Work, the minister was accompanied by the undersecretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Isabel Goicoechea, and was attended by representatives of other ministries and public and private bodies involved in road safety.

The Plenary of the High Council for Traffic and Road Safety is a consultative and participatory body whose objectives are to promote and improve traffic, road safety and sustainable mobility, as well as to promote agreement between the different public administrations and entities that carry out activities in these areas.

In his final speech, Grande-Marlaska described the Road Safety Strategy project as "exciting" and stressed that "it is the result of a process that brings together the vision of supranational and national bodies".

At an international level, the United Nations included road safety in the 2030 Agenda as one of the main public health problems to be addressed through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); at a national level, the strategy joins "all Government policies that in one way or another seek a new model of mobility that is more modern, efficient, sustainable, healthy and safe", said the minister.

In line with the objectives of the United Nations and the European Union, the Road Safety Strategy 2030 aims to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured in road crashes by 50 per cent compared to the figures for 2019, when 1,755 people died, 8,613 were seriously injured and 130,000 were slightly injured. These figures give a death rate of 37 deaths per million, below the EU average of 51 deaths.

Activities carried out

The plenary heard the report on relevant activities carried out in 2020 and 2021 related to road safety, including the reduction of speed to 30 kilometres per hour on single-lane roads in cities; the reform of the Traffic and Road Safety Law, which comes into force on 21 March; the regulation of personal mobility vehicles and their technical characteristics manual, the new V-16 hazard signalling or the new Vocational Training Higher Technical Degree in Safe and Sustainable Mobility, among others.

Non official translation