A bus in Nantes (illustrative image).

-

JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER / AFP

In Paris, Road Safety has installed a bus and a truck on the forecourt of the Arab World Institute (IMA) in order to show the dangerousness of blind spots of heavy vehicles by materializing them on the ground.

Objective: to raise awareness among cyclists and pedestrians, whose mortality curve is considered worrying.

Since January 1, all vehicles weighing more than 3.5 tonnes (heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches) are required to affix, on the sides and at the rear, signs showing their blind spots (inaccessible areas to the driver's field of vision) in order to warn vulnerable road users driving nearby.

Follow the Road Safety press workshop dedicated to the new signage of blind spots for heavy vehicles (heavy goods vehicles, buses, coaches), live from the forecourt of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

pic.twitter.com/uOFvbYcKEC

- Road Safety (@RoutePlusSure) January 6, 2021

A disturbing trend

Foremost among them are pedestrians and cyclists, particularly vulnerable by their size, which makes them less visible and more likely to slip out of the necessarily reduced field of vision of the driver of a heavy vehicle.

9% of fatal pedestrian accidents and 8% of cyclists are due to a blind spot, estimates Road Safety, which had already launched in September its first communication campaign specifically targeting cyclists.

More numerous on a daily basis thanks to the health crisis, they are also more fatally mown on the road: with respectively 29 and 37 people dead, the months of July and September 2020 constitute records in terms of road fatalities of cyclists, all of them years combined.

158 lost their lives from January to November 2020 against 187 for the whole of 2019.

The general trend concerning cyclists, as well as pedestrians, is therefore deemed “worrying” by the Interministerial Delegate for Road Safety, Marie Gautier-Melleray, in a general context of a sharp drop in road fatalities due to the health crisis, which limited travel.

The number of deaths each year on the road will indeed drop, in 2020, for the first time below the 3,000 mark: before the publication, at the end of January, of the figures for the month of December, 2,061 people were killed in metropolitan France (they were 3,244 in 2019).

World

Road safety: Containment measures have reduced the number of fatal accidents worldwide

Society

Road safety: Pedestrians more victims of fatal accidents after switching to winter time

  • Society

  • Pedestrians

  • Bike

  • Road safety