Road safety: Malta loses pole position in Europe

Malta must work harder to make roads safer for no real progress in this direction was registered last, according to data released by Brussels.

Until a few years ago, Malta boasted the safest roads in the EU but, while other member states managed to significantly cut road fatalities, the island did not register any progress.

The safest roads in the EU last year were the UK’s, with 32 fatalities per million inhabitants, down from 61 a decade earlier, according to the data.

Other member states making impressive improvements were Sweden and the Netherlands, both with 33 fatalities per million, down from 66 and 62 per million respectively.

Denmark too slashed road fatalities by half to an average of 40 per million.

Malta, which, compared to other member states, has road safety advantages such as a small road network and no motorways, registered 41 fatalities per million inhabitants in 2011, the same as in 2001.

The worst performers last year were Poland and Greece, where road deaths are above the EU average of 61 per million. Road fatalities in Poland last year stood at 109 per million and Greece registered a fatality rate of 97 per million.

According to the EU’s Road Safety Action Plan, member states have to try to slash road fatalities by half by 2020 when compared to 2001 levels.

However, the European Commission does not consider the latest results to be very promising and many member states, including Malta, are way off target. They need to make significant efforts in the coming years to improve their road safety.

Visibly disappointed with the results, European Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas announced he was writing to all member states asking for concrete plans to make roads safer.

“These figures are a wake-up call. The slowest decrease in road deaths in a decade was registered in 2011 and 85 people still die on Europe’s roads every day. This is unacceptable,” he said.

“I am writing to ministers in all member states to ask for information about national road safety enforcement plans for 2012. I want to be reassured that even in tough economic times this important task, which is so central to road safety, is not being scaled back,” he said.

The Commission said it would be making an extra effort this year to address the problem of motorcycles, where fatalities have not dropped for more than a decade.

Mr Kallas is determined to intensify efforts relating to national enforcement and to vulnerable road users using motorcycles.