This is the largest civil social platform in the EU created to improve road safety.

The initiative was launched by the European Commission in 2004, and it’s primary objective is to reduce the number of accidents by half on European roads. Based on the principle of shared responsibility, the Charter represents everything the civil society could do in order to prevent accidents and to decrease the number of fatalities.

In the past twenty years, the European Union has made significant progress in the reduction of road fatalities: between 2001 and 2010, even though the volume of traffic has continuously increased, the number of road fatalities decreased by 43% in the continent. This trend is still going on, since 2010, this number has reduced by further 18%. However, it still means that 70 people die in road accidents every day, and many others suffer serious injuries.

Major goals of the Charter

• Promoting and supporting European associations, schools, universities, companies of different types and scale, and authorities in order to take measures towards the improvement of European road safety.
• Supporting the contribution of civil society to increase road safety. The objective is to make it easier for the members of community to obtain and share knowledge and information regarding road safety within the EU.
• Sharing road safety-related experiences and practices on all levels of EU governments.

Membership

The Charter has 3400 members from 28 member states of the EU, including state and private-owned organizations, companies of different sizes, associations, institutions, alliances, or even cities and regions. Besides, amongst the members, we can also find schools and other groups of the civil society who have committed themselves towards increasing road safety.

Objectives

HTA expects that after joining the Charta, they will be even more empowered to influence important road safety issues, which make up the backbone of the integrated approach of road safety. The fundamental pillars are the following:

• Vehicle safety: innovation, safety devices, vehicle control.
• Infrastructure-safety: a more secure road infrastructure, road safety impact studies.
• Informing drivers, making them more “sensitive” to better understand the intentions of other road users, and as a result, to radically decrease the number of accidents.