DEKRA Vision Zero Award presented to Spanish town
Seven Years without a Traffic Fatality: Award for Torrejón de Ardoz
The Spanish town of Torrejón de Ardoz has been presented with the DEKRA Vision Zero Award. With this award, which has now been presented for the second time, the leading international expert organization recognizes Torrejón de Ardoz’s achievement of not a single traffic fatality within the town being reported for seven years. The award was presented to María Dolores Navarro Ruíz, the Vice-Mayor of the town, which has 130,000 inhabitants and is close to Madrid, as part of DEKRA’s annual event to present the Road Safety Report 2017 in Brussels.
- Objective of zero traffic fatalities in urban areas is being achieved
- Interactive map can be found at www.dekra-vision-zero.com
- Vice-Mayor: “Road traffic fatalities can be avoided”
“In accordance with our charter, we have dedicated ourselves to road safety for the past 90 years. With our new DEKRA Vision Zero Award, we want to make it clear that the aim of zero traffic fatalities does not have to be a utopian vision,” said DEKRA CEO Stefan Kölbl when he presented the award. “Overall, of course, Vision Zero is not yet a reality. However, extensive data that has been evaluated by our accident researchers shows that this objective is achievable in urban areas and is already the reality in many towns and cities in Europe today.”
“This highlights the need to step up efforts to further improve road safety and get ever closer to achieving Vision Zero – including with regard to serious injuries,” said Kölbl.
Vice-Mayor María Dolores Navarro Ruíz sees the award as recognition of the work carried out by municipal traffic planners and local police officers to constantly improve road safety. But it is also testament to the exemplary conduct of drivers in the town. “Road traffic accidents are among the leading causes of death worldwide and are also one of the most arbitrary. They cause great pain and destroy families and people,” she said at the award ceremony. “For many years we have considered this upsetting statistic on road traffic accidents to be inevitable, a kind of unavoidable price that we have to pay and something that we have to learn to accept. But experience has shown that this is not necessarily the case.”
The interactive world map at
www.dekra-vision-zero.com
shows the towns and cities with over 50,000 inhabitants in the USA, Japan and many European countries that have achieved the objective of zero traffic fatalities in at least one year since 2009.