Project EDWARD
A day without a single fatality on Europe’s roads? That’s the aim of European Day Without a Road Death - Project EDWARD for short, each year.
Launched in 2016, Project EDWARD is an innovative way of promoting road safety. Supported by public and private sector partners and drivers across the continent, 2019’s day of action is Thursday 26 September.
The aim of the project is to spearhead significant and sustained reductions in deaths and serious injuries on our roads. Achieving one ‘European Day Without a Road Death’ is something all of us can understand and aspire to.
No-one sets out to have an accident, but they happen. And the majority of these accidents are due to drivers making mistakes either consciously, or unconsciously. One problem is that we can get complacent and believe it won’t happen to us. We can fall into the trap of picking up bad habits and pretty quickly, some negative aspects of what we do behind the wheel soon become normal, and the more we get away with these things, the less risk we attach to them.
Recent road accident results paint a mixed picture of progress in reducing deaths and serious injuries on Europe’s roads. For the first few years of this decade, countries across the EU have been highly successful in pursuing the 2020 50% reduction target. But the arrival of a second successive year of disappointing news shows that this downward trend has stagnated.
Group road safety manager, Mark Bromhall, said: ‘The roads can be a dangerous place and we want everybody to get home safely every day. Please take a moment, before setting off on the road today to ask yourself one question: “What can I do today, to ensure that I don’t become a statistic?”; then do it every day.’
