European Road Safety Charter seminar in Sweden - Follow up

Country:
Belgium
Member since: October 2013
Submitted by ersc-admin on

The European Road Safety Charter workshop took place on Tuesday, 29 May 2018, at the Swedish Waterfront Congress Centre, Stockholm, Sweden.


The event was opened by Mr. Lars Olov Sjöström from Swedish Abstaining Motorists Association (MHF), the co-organiser of the event. Ms. Ylva Berg, from the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation presented the Vision Zero strategy in Sweden, from its inception back in 1997, to its re-launch in 2016, as well as further developments planned to improve road safety in Sweden.


Mr. Antonio Avenoso, the Executive Director of the European Transport Safety Council gave an overview of the road safety situation in the EU and presented the recent EU developments, i.e. proposals in the area of road safety.


The presentation made by the ERSC team focused on explaining the objectives of the European Road Safety Charter, describing the milestones of the current phase and underlining the reasons for organisations to join the Charter, to develop initiatives for improving road safety and share them with the Charter community. Those who were already Charter signatories were encouraged to continue being active on the platform, to promote the Charter within their networks and apply for the annual Excellence in Road Safety Awards.


The winners of the previous Excellence in Road Safety Awards, MHF representatives Lars Olov Sjöström and Sabrina Sandhu presented one of their new road safety projects, an app aimed to help reduce drink driving by providing a quick and simple method of signaling drunk drivers on the roads.


Professor Ulf Björnstig and Ms. Birgitta Stener from the Swedish Society of Traffic Medicine (STMF) presented their work in supporting research on injury reducing measures in traffic, promoting driver fitness issues and providing traffic medicine expertise in the development of traffic safety planning. They also showed concrete examples of research by STMF members that had a real impact on improving road safety, for example through identifying risks of small overlap crashes.


Mr. Michael Axelsson Deputy Chairman of the Swedish National Association of Driving Schools (STR) showed how pedagogy can be used to influence attitudes and behavior of drivers. He explained how situational and behavioural risks can be identified and addressed by making the drivers reflect over their behaviours.


Mr. Patrick Magnusson, Regional manager for the Swedish Association of Road Transport explained how his organization promotes safe transportation methods from responsible haulers by using the concept of Fair Transport. This ensures that the consumer has to option to buy transport from a hauler that meets road safety, emissions and work environment requirements and provide openly their sustainability reports.


The ERSC team presented good practice examples from across Europe and from different types of organisations. The presentation included examples from a municipality, a large company, two associations, a school and a traffic research organization, proving once again the diversity of ERSC members and the fact that regardless of the type of activity, each entity can help improve road safety.


For the discussion part, participants were split into four groups. They discussed the good practices presented and the role of the Charter project in pushing further progress by engaging all types of stakeholders. Some of the participants expressed their interest in joining the ERSC platform and finding ways to cooperate in this project

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