The New European Road Safety Observatory - SafetyNet

In 2004 there were over 43,000 people who were killed on the roads of the 25\nmember states of the European Union (EU), additionally around 3.3 million people\nwere injured1. The costs to society exceeded €180 billion which is around twice the\nannual budget of the European Commission and 2% of EU GDP. In 2001 the\nEuropean Commission adopted a target of reducing fatalities by 50% within a\ndecade and identified several areas where it could make a direct contribution within\nthe constraints of subsidiarity. The target was reaffirmed in 2003 in the Road Safety\nAction Programme that provided further detail about actions it planned to introduce. A\nkey element in the Programme concerned the development of a new European Road\nSafety Observatory to gather data and knowledge to inform future safety policies.\nThe development of the Observatory was to be undertaken by the Sixth Framework\nfunded project “SafetyNet”. This paper describes the structure of the Observatory\nand the progress in developing new EU-wide accident data information within\nSafetyNet.