YTP and Global Youth Coalition lead session on Starting the new Decade of Action for Road Safety
The Global Youth Coalition and Young Transport Professionals (YTP) of Australia partnered up for an online session on starting the decade of action on road safety last Wednesday, 18 November. The session featured Coalition youth advisory board members Grace Willems and Maolin Macatangay.
During the session, Grace talked about the Coalition and emphasized how it focuses on engaging youth in meaningful participation geared toward achieving the global targets on road safety.
Following the presentation, the session continued with a panel facilitated by Maolin. The panelists included Rob McInerny – executive director of the International Road Assessment Program (iRap), Grace Willems – planning and infrastructure of the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ), Wayne Moon – Specialist in road safety at the Victorian Department of Transport, and Alex Herold – Senior Insights Officer at the Department of Transport.
Wayne focused on the topic of achieving vision zero and how road safety data is used to break up the trauma problem into different elements. He explained how looking out for these points would help best determine how the pillars of the safe systems approach can be applied in a way that reduces road trauma to zero.
Elaborating more on the importance of data in road safety, Alex elaborated on road safety data evaluation and how it’s important to understand and study performance and trends while waiting for the long-term outcomes, which are more statistically significant. According to Alex, the data will help understand the impact of different road safety projects and initiatives.
Infrastructure plays a vital role in road safety and sustainable mobility. During the discussion, Rob talked about the work iRap is doing in terms of providing star ratings for roads, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, and vehicle occupants. Rob emphasized how important it is for the different pillars of road safety to work together to achieve 50 by 30 and vision zero.
Finally, Grace went over why it is important and necessary to involve the community in conversations surrounding sustainable mobility.
“The most critical part of those components that’s often missed is that we do need to open that dialogue with the community and start conversations”