UN urged to act on road deaths

The United Nations must take urgent steps to address the world's growing road deaths crisis, Nobel Peace Prize winners have said.

The latest forecasts show that unless action is taken, more than 20 million lives could be lost from 2000-2015, with a doubling of the annual death rate by 2030, the Make Roads Safe campaign said.

Former US president Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sanchez - all Nobel Peace Prize laureates - wrote an open letter to the UN, urging the world body to call for a global ministerial conference on road safety.

The Make Roads Safe campaign will also deliver a petition of more than one million signatures from people around the world to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ahead of a General Assembly session on the issue at the world body's headquarters in New York.

The open letter said someone was killed or seriously injured on the world's roads "every six seconds" and called for the UN to "address one of the most serious and yet overlooked issues of our time".

Lord Robertson, chairman of the Commission for Global Road Safety, said: "(The) debate can mark the moment when the world community looks out at the suffering, the grief, and the cost of road injuries and decides to begin to end it.

"This is in our power to do. Collectively we have the tools, we have the knowledge, and we have the means. We must act."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: "The UN can decide today whether or not to take action - if the children, pedestrians and cyclists in developing countries, who represent the vast majority of the casualties, had the vote there would only be one outcome."

Former US president Jimmy Carter said the campaign was "an essential step towards saving the 3,000 lives that are lost daily in road accidents".

The UN's General Assembly session will hear that road deaths are now the number one killer of young people aged 10-24 worldwide, with more than 1.2 million people killed and 50 million others injured each year.