EXCLUSIVE
"What is dangerous is not the infrastructure, it's the traffic," says Chantal Perrichon, President of the League against Road Violence. Sunday, his association publishes exclusively in the JDD , with Europe 1, new maps that show that the most serious accidents occur mostly on the most straight roads and the best maintained ... Those very where many elected representatives plead for a return to a limitation at 90 km / h, and no longer 80.
"These beautiful infrastructures where a maximum of vehicles circulate"
These new maps show precisely, for each department, the routes where fatal accidents occur, or those who have made serious injuries, for the 2013-2017 period. The finding is the same as in a previous study conducted by the association in 2018: half of the deaths occur on just 15% of the road network. "Contrary to what the drivers imagine, it is not on the small roads or in mountains that the risk is maximum", diagnosis Chantal Perrichon, questioned by Europe 1.
"The risk is greatest on the beautiful roads, those which have no median separator, these beautiful infrastructures where a maximum number of vehicles circulate," continues the president. "The majority of the dead are found on a dozen tracks for each department, hence the need not to return to 80 km / h, because increasing the speed will inevitably lead to an increase in the number of accidents."
4,000 letters soon sent to the prefects and local elected officials
However, these roads are precisely those covered by a LREM amendment to an article of the mobility bill, voted by the deputies in June and which opens the way for a relaxation by the departments and mayors of the limitation to 80 km / h on secondary roads. While this amendment must return to committee in the National Assembly on Monday, the League against Road Violence intends to send this week 4,000 letters to the prefects, parliamentarians and presidents of county councils to alert them.
"In 2013, a report from experts from the National Road Safety Council showed that if we went from 90 to 80km / h on these roads, there was an opportunity to save between 350 and 400 lives", justifies Chantal Perrichon , for which "the passage to 80 km / h did not bring these results this year" because of the degradation of radars controlling speed. According to the president, however, "206 lives" were saved "thanks to this measure in 2018". "For us, the priority is to continue this experiment which was to go until the end of July 2020," she concludes.