Former rally driver Titi Aur sounds the alarm on the number of road accidents in our country and demands that the authorities take measures to limit them.
„In Romania, 4 – 5 people die, and according to the new medical criteria, we have 10 seriously injured and 70 – 80 lightly injured in road accidents, every day! In recent years, I have been requested several times or provoked discussions with the authorities to come up with proposals/solutions on this subject, I presented several projects, but, unfortunately, nothing was done. (…) There are solutions, but the authorities are non-existent from this point of view,” the Titi Aur Academy informed in a Monday’s release.
According to the source, Romania loses annually, from the state budget, as a result of road accidents, 3.3 billion euros in social costs (according to the Road Safety Country Overview, issued by the European Road Safety Observatory, a structure within the European Commission) and another 1.5 billions of euros through the insurance system.
According to Titi Aur, starting from 2021, the medical criteria have changed in Romania by which the injury resulting from a road accident falls into serious injury or minor injury and, in this context, in recent years, from the highest at the state level, the message „serious accidents decreased by 40%” began to spread.
„Yes, they decreased… only ‘from the pen’! Because, in the period from 2004 to 2019, we had, on average, about 8,000 serious accidents per year. In 2020, their number decreased naturally, because we circulated less (the COVID pandemic). In 2021, according to the new reporting criteria, the number of serious accidents dropped sharply, to approximately 4,000 per year,” says the quoted statement.
Titi Aur mentioned that a „correct” and „realistic” analysis should be done by relating the number of dead, seriously injured and slightly injured respectively to the number of kilometers traveled.
„According to this criterion, the European situation is as follows: the Nordic countries have 22-25 deaths per 10 billion kilometers traveled, the European average is 70 deaths, the penultimate country, Bulgaria, has 180 deaths, and Romania has over 300 deaths per 10 billion kilometers traveled At the same time, in the United States of America, there are 30-35 deaths per 10 billion kilometers traveled, a value comparable to the Nordic countries and far below the European average,” the release explains.
In Titi Aur’s opinion, the Romanian authorities prefer to „hide” behind criteria which, although correct from a statistical point of view, offer a „false” image of the traffic reality.
AGERPRES
