Why swapping dirt tracks for new roads can be lethal

Road crashes are on course to overtake HIV-Aids by 2015 as the main cause of death and disability for children aged 5-14 in developing countries. Roads built with foreign aid are often so poorly designed that death rates soar, according to a world road safety report.

Britain is among the leading donor nations that have failed to ensure that minimum safety standards are applied to road projects it has helped to fund, says the Commission for Global Road Safety. It forecast that the 1.2 million road deaths worldwide in 2002 will double by 2020 unless action is taken.

More than 90 per cent of the deaths occur in developing countries even though they have much lower car ownerships levels than richer nations.
Africa has the most dangerous road network, with 28.3 road deaths for every 100,000 people each year, compared with 5.6 deaths in Britain. In several African countries a motor vehicle is 100 times more likely to be involved in a fatal road crash than one in Britain.

The World Bank recommended in 1982 that 5-10 per cent of the funding for a road project supported by foreign aid should be spent on safety measures, including proper pavements and crash barriers. But a $1.2 billion (£600 million) fund for roads in Africa, approved by the G8 group of leading countries, has allocated only $20 million for safety, or 1.7 per cent of the total. In Britain, the Department for International Development committed £330,000 for road safety overseas in the year to March 2004 in a total spending of £20 million on road projects.

David Ward, director-general of the FIA Foundation, which promotes road safety and funded the report, said: “New roads can make a bad situation much worse by raising the speed and volume of traffic while doing nothing to protect pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.”

Village markets displaced from dirt tracks often returned to the same place once the tracks became paved roads, he said. Deaths rose sharply because vehicles sped through the markets on the new roads.

The report calls for a UN summit on road safety next year and a commitment from the G8 to devote at least 10 per cent of the development aid for roads to safety measures.

It says that donor countries underestimate the impact of road deaths, which can result in the victim’s family starving to death. In India and Bangladesh half the families that lost somebody in a crash fell below the poverty line.

The World Health Organisation calculates that the health and economic costs of road crashes in developing countries often exceed the total amount they receive in foreign aid.