The population of the world is growing every day, every day the production of vehicles increases as the demand of them do exponentially and as a consequence, the vehicular traffic has made many governments around the world to take measurements. There are many campaigns to educate all citizens about the safety rules that need to be followed to have fewer accidents, injuries and deaths. Most of these efforts are focused to stop the excessive speed or drunk driving, but the pedestrians have increased, too.
Due to the increase in the price of petroleum around the world, many people that owned a car decided to start walking or to use the public transportation system. One of the biggest issues is that the infrastructure of the streets is not safe, or are dangerous due to the driver’s behaviour. In 2010 there were 273,000 pedestrian deaths around the world. That number let us see that there is no pedestrian safety in a lot of countries.
In fact, a lot of the deaths are in African and American countries as a result of a lack of knowledge or common sense to use the streets.
The problem that the government and insurance companies have is the cost of every injury or funeral in some cases. They have to cover some of the expenses or even give a pension for those that don’t fully recover. The resources covered by public institutions is 1% or 2% of the GDP, the insurance companies depend on the policy their clients gave.
Pedestrian Safety in El Salvador
In El Salvador is a big issue, the deaths by accidents are increasing, in 2018 the number was of 1,200 dead pedestrians on the year. The ages were between 15 to 29 years, the reason is that there is no awareness nor interest from the persons to receive or follow the instruction for pedestrian safety. Is all a problem of comfort too, the person would walk in the road instead of climbing some stairs to go into the pedestrian walkways. The government had invested is elevators for those handicap persons, so they can travel between sides of the roads safely.
A lot of the youngsters’ fatalities are a consequence of the distance that they travel to go to school. A lot of the towns in the country doesn’t have the proper infrastructure on the roads or walkways, this is a serious issue for those that walk a lot of kilometres to go to their destinies and the lack of transportation to help them with this.
In the present year, until the month of June, there have been 625 deaths and 38 % of those were run over deaths. A significant number that tells the government to improve in the cities with investments in lights, walkways and campaigns to teach the person the consequences and the rules that are needed to be respected to avoid any increase casualties and injuries that can ruin people’s lives and families lives too.
In H.appycities we work to improve the cities and help to build safer, happier and more stable cities in the countries. The technology that we use can make a difference in the place you live, to know more about the project join us.
KW: pedestrian safety
