UN hears demands that 10% of spending on roads should go on safety measures

The United Nations has held a debate on road safety, after campaigners warned that numbers of deaths and injuries from road collisions were on a par with the devastation caused by HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Traffic crashes amounted to a global “epidemic,” they said, in which a child dies every three minutes.

The UN General Assembly was told by the Commission for Global Road Safety that more than 1.2 million people are killed every year on the world’s roads, a figure that is set to double by 2030.

The debate comes after research from the World Health Organization projected that …