Editorial

摘要

Over the past few years, road safety issues are sadly emerging as a major priority to be tackled by governments worldwide. Ever more alarming data are increasingly, demanding the use of intelligent solutions for effective and efficient preventive and management actions. To cite a few, nearly 1,300,000 people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day, and an additional 20,000,000-50,000,000 are injured or disabled. In addition, road traffic crashes rank as the ninth leading cause of death, as they account for 2.2% of all deaths globally, and are the leading cause of death among young people (age 15-29), and the second leading cause of death worldwide among very young people (age 5-14). Accordingly, such scenario is rapidly leading to a no more sustainable situation concerning social costs: more than USD$518 billion are spent globally, thereby costing to individual countries from 1%-2% of their annual gross domestic product (GDP), on the average. Amongst these statistics, however, data related to fatalities rate in low and middle-income countries, which amounts to the 90% of the total fatalities with less than half of the world's vehicles, should draw the attention of the experts in the field of road safety and guide decided improvement strategies.