‘Road safety issue as urgent as COVID’: UN's special envoy for global road safety: PTI

Not enough is being done for the “pandemic on our roads,” said UN's Special Envoy for Global Road Safety Jean Todt, calling the issue of road safety as urgent as COVID-19,  the Press Trust of India reported.

Talking at the “Vision Zero Conference for Road Safety for All”, Todt made this comparison due to the lives and economies that are destroyed on a daily basis due to lack of road safety and said that issue of road safety doesn’t garner the same kind of financial and social support yet as other subjects.

"The COVID-19 experience provided an example of how humanity can bond together to discover and apply solutions when the emergency appears urgent enough to everyone. That example alone should show us that we are not doing enough for the pandemic on our roads, we need to better persuade people that it is just as urgent as COVID-19 in how it destroys lives and economies," he said.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), road crashes kill more than 1.3 million people each year - more than two every minute - with 9 in 10 of these preventable deaths occurring in low-and middle-income countries.