“Road Safety should not just be another additional criterion, but a basic condition for liveable cities. (…) For a sustainable city, inhabitants need to be healthy and for this, we must significantly reduce road fatalities and injuries”, said FIA president who addressed the audience in his role as UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Road Safety on 18 October, during the Special Session on Transport and Mobility  at the UN Habitat III Conference currently taking place in Quito.

Jean Todt highlighted the fact that road crashes leave 1.25 million people dead and 50 million injured every year and that “transport and mobility can only be sustainable if they are also safe. It cannot be sustainable if it is taking the lives of a vast number of the population”.

During his presentation, taking part in the discussion on the New Urban Agenda that will be adopted on October 20 at the end of the Habitat III conference, Jean Todt also emphasized that sustainable transport and mobility in the urban setting require a combination of policy elements such as affordable public transport, investment in infrastructure for motorized and non-motorized transport, environmentally friendly, efficient and multimodal transport options.

According to Jean Todt, these policies must align with urban and spatial planning, land management, housing, and other relevant policies and safety must be taken into account when planning urban transport.

Before UN Habitat III in Quito, the first Habitat Conference took place in 1976 in Vancouver, Canada, and two decades later, Habitat II was held in Istanbul, Turkey. Talking about the future, Jean Todt declared, “Wouldn’t it be an achievement if during Habitat IV Conference in 20 years, we could report that mobility and transport are safe in all the cities around the world?”.

In order to achieve this goal of building cities with safe roads and sustainable mobility, Jean Todt asserted, “we need cooperation and partnerships through integrated transport and urban planning at the national and urban levels”.

At the end of his presentation, the short film directed by Luc Besson “Save Kids Lives”, which supports the campaign launched by the UN Road Safety Collaboration, was shown to illustrate the fact that 1.8 million children across the world walk to school every day and that 500 of them never make it to the classroom as a result of road crashes. Jean Todt conluded, “this video is a reminder of why we need ensure that road safety is a key consideration when we think about a future where transport and mobility are truly sustainable.”