“When I started as a boy, it was very, very dangerous,” he says. “People weren’t surprised if someone was killed in a race car.”
That world no longer exists. Decades of engineering, regulation and relentless safety work have made a 200km/h build-up survivable. “Now everybody would be surprised if someone got hurt in a race car,” says Mr. Todt.
Now he wants the same transformation for the school run, the motorbike commute, the delivery rider weaving through traffic – because the numbers on regular roads are still where motor racing used to be.
Millions dead and injured
1.2 million people are killed on the world’s roads every year. Another 50 million are injured. It is the leading cause of death for children and young people aged five to 29 – a toll so constant that Mr. Todt, now the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for road safety, calls it “a silent pandemic on the road.”
“Unfortunately, you get used to the situation,” he says.
This week, world leaders and ministers gather at UN headquarters in New York for a two-day meeting with the aim of halving the number of road deaths by 2030, a goal the world is badly on track to achieve.
What makes the crisis unusual, Mr. Todt argues, is that no one lacks solutions.
“Unlike other pandemics, we have the recipes: education, law enforcement, quality of vehicles, quality of roads, quality of post-accident care,” he says. Enforce seat belts, helmets, speed limits and drink-driving laws properly, he says, and “we would immediately halve the number of victims on the roads.”
Ninety percent of traffic deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where safer roads, stronger laws and real enforcement are still a long way off.
Start them young
The special envoy starts young. “If you educate a young boy or girl of six, seven, eight, they will immediately know how to behave,” he says, and it is crucial that they pass that on to the adults who drive them around.
But education without consequences will get you nowhere, he warns. “If people know they can behave badly without consequences, there is no reason to change.” Corruption, he adds bluntly, “can’t work with” effective law enforcement.
New risks keep emerging. E-bikes, e-scooters and app-based delivery riders, who are often paid by the order and ride the clock, sometimes without a helmet, have added a new danger to city streets. Self-driving cars may eventually help, Todt says, but not soon, and not where the crisis is worst: countries still running on aging car fleets and unstable public transport.
Jean Todt during his visit to Kyrgyzstan.
Speaking up
Even within his own institution, Todt says that road safety is struggling to be heard. “Very often I travel, I meet the UN team and I say: ‘I want to be the first to talk about road safety.’ Very often I am right.”
His pitch, devoid of jargon, is essentially what transformed his old sport: deaths were never inevitable, and neither are these.
“Prevention is key,” he says. It took motor racing decades to believe that. The roads, he hopes, will not need that long.
