How many road accidents happen every year in Italy and Europe? The European Commission replies
The current pace of change is insufficient to reach the EU target of halving the number of deaths by 2030. Here are all the data on road accidents in Italy and Europe presented by the European Commission as part of the "European Charter of Road Safety ". Marco Foti's article
The European Commission, as part of the "European Road Safety Charter" and on the occasion of the Excellence in Road Safety Awards, has published data on road accidents for 2021, following the publication of preliminary data in March 2022. The numbers collected by DG Transport show a still alarming figure: just under twenty thousand people died on EU roads last year, with an increase of 6% compared to 2020, when, however, the effect of the pandemic had a heavy impact on the data analysis, highlighting a significant reduction in mobility throughout the European perimeter.
The data analyzed by the Commission highlights a sharp decline in accident rates (number of deaths in absolute value and per million inhabitants), which followed an annual decline of 17% between 2019 and 2020.
The median value of the number of deaths per million inhabitants recorded in 2021 is equal to 45. Compared to this indicator, some Member States have shown a significant increase in road deaths that require a more in-depth analysis and urgent action by the Union European. The death rate varies from 15 / million in Norway and 20 / million in Sweden to 81 / million in Bulgaria and 92 / million in Romania (ranking that excludes countries with less than 100 deaths per year).
Italy exceeds the EU median value with a mortality rate of 49 deaths per million inhabitants, compared to 45 / million inhab. of the Union. An aspect that the Commission does not underestimate and that requires particular attention because, but it applies to all countries, the current pace of change is insufficient to achieve the EU target of halving the number of deaths by 2030.
To this end, the Commission has published a series of reports within its European Road Safety Observatory, providing detailed data and analysis on a range of road safety topics such as children, the elderly, novice drivers, cyclists, driving in a state of intoxication, personal mobility devices, driver distraction and wearing seat belts.
Topics on which, even in this magazine, attention has been drawn in recent years in terms of suggestions and interventions in the field of innovation of technological infrastructures (IoT and blockchain) to support mobility.
The current state of the Italian primary and secondary road network requires safety measures and continuous monitoring, by virtue of the dated construction. As indicated by MIT through Ministerial Decree no. 430 of 2019 it is necessary to activate an "intelligent" mapping of the infrastructures by building a computerized register of the present works (based for example on blockchain technology) that identifies their age, structural parameters, state of "health", history of maintenance interventions.
In this sense, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility has started the process of organizing the National IT Archive of Public Works. AINOP, however, must be able to establish a "cadastre" organized by classes of potential risks and relative priorities of the maintenance interventions to be implemented, with the simultaneous installation of an adequate sensor system that uses Structural Health Monitoring (SHM ), which can also be summarized in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
How?
By encouraging Smart Roads on Italian roads, in parallel with technological innovation, and new policies on road infrastructures for which a digital transformation process has begun aimed at introducing traffic observation and monitoring platforms, data and information processing models , advanced services to infrastructure managers, the Public Administration and road users.
Europe is light years ahead on these issues, Italy has struggled in recent years. The PNRR allocates only 200 million euros for the entire Italian territory which first of all must cover 6,000 km of motorways and subsequently the state roads. Ridiculous investments for a nation that must carry on the development and progress of the territory. The review of the PNRR could find a synthesis in satisfying these (dated) criticalities.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/quanti-incidenti-stradali-avvengono-ogni-anno-in-italia-ed-europa-risponde-la-commissione-europea/ on Sat, 12 Nov 2022 07:14:51 +0000.