In office since 2015, Emmanuel Barbe will leave on February 24 his duties as inter-ministerial delegate for road safety. The future police prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône takes stock, exclusively for Le Parisien - today in France, of his five years at the head of road safety. He returns in particular to the consequences of the 80 km / h.
When you arrived in 2015, road deaths were on the rise. What about five years later?
EMMANUEL BARBE. I arrived after a year 2014 where there had been a 3.5% increase in the number of deaths and I was entrusted with the mission of putting the figures in the right direction. We ended up stabilizing them in 2017. In 2018, despite a 7% increase in traffic compared to 2013, we recorded a historically low level of road deaths. And this is largely thanks to the application of 80km / h. These results are obviously fragile and the mission is extremely complicated. It must be remembered that in the 1970s, there were 18,000 people killed each year in France behind the wheel. Some weekends, 350 people died on the road! Today, we have reduced the risk but each additional step is more complicated and this requires increasingly diversified measures. But I was lucky to be constantly supported in this mission.
Not by all policies!
For the past thirty years, all the successive policies and governments that have supported road safety, whether they are on the right or on the left, have really taken their fill when they knew that certain measures would ultimately only bring them unpopularity. But why did they do it, why, like the Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, do they continue to do it? By sense of duty. Take Jacques Chirac: the first act of his second mandate was to decree road safety as a major national cause and to generalize automatic radars. Remember the little film that we had broadcast on our site by taking an INA archive from the 70s: people were already complaining at the time against measures that seem obvious to us today such as the wearing of belt. It hasn't changed today. At the time of the 80km / h, I received filthy anonymous letters.
Why are the French so rash on these issues?
I do not know why it is much more passionate than elsewhere. In Switzerland, where we have driven at 80 km / h for thirty years and where the slightest speeding is very heavily sanctioned, there is not as much debate as here. Does it make sense that I do between 500 and 600 interviews each year? I am surprised that this is such a controversial subject because road safety is a public health issue that benefits the entire population. Have you seen so many articles questioning tobacco control policy? But in France, as soon as we take a road safety measure, everyone feels competent and has a say. Driving a car, however, is a fact, no skill in accidentology. Fortunately there are women.
Why ?
Because they have a much greater risk aversion than men. The reality is this, and you have to practice saying it: "Men behind the wheel, dead at the turn. 82% of the authors of fatal accidents are men. And each year, around 460 women are accidentally killed by a man on the road.
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Why wouldn't we appoint a woman to succeed you?
There have already been women at the head of Road Safety and the feminization of leadership positions is today one of the government's objectives.
Is the association 40 million motorists your sworn enemy?
No. For five years, I never tried to argue and I will not start now. But I do not understand, and we have made it known, why this association is going to look for people who improvise accidentologists. And this, for the sole purpose of calling into question statistics which are established in a completely independent manner. We are entering into a kind of distortion of reality and this is a dangerous slope, which sometimes fuels conspiracy. When you sponsor studies to people, whatever their qualities, who have never published anything on the issue of accidentology and you say on all TV shows that the results are false, that they are rigged, you are contributing to a sort of degradation of the debate and a questioning of public speaking. Look also at the number of lawyers, certainly excellent, who come to speak on the platforms of accidentology when it is a science that they have no reason to know.
You were talking about a political consensus around road safety. This consensus was shattered with the 80 km / h measurement.
It was said that the numbers would go down thanks to this measure and they have gone down. Not as much as we would have liked because of the radar destruction phenomenon, but there is no doubt that thanks to the application of this measure, we have saved 334 lives in 18 months!
Why, despite the discontent of many elected officials, did Edouard Philippe stand firm on this measure?
The Prime Minister knew very well that this measure would be unpopular, but he took it because he knew that it would reduce the number of road deaths. But of course, the question of the acceptability of the measures is at the heart of road safety policy, and we must obviously pay close attention to it. We must also put the unpopularity of this measure into perspective. Polls show that 42% of people are in favor and that people totally opposed represent barely 20%.
But has there been enough consultation?
We have been criticized a lot, but I would remind you that speed limits, since the Highway Code has been in existence, have always been set centrally. When France adopted 50 km / h in the city in 1990, no one asked locally for advice. And in this case, the 80 km / h had been the subject of very long discussions within the National Road Safety Council which had proposed it. But it was a measure which very quickly took on an extremely political dimension.
How to explain that the controversy is still not extinguished today?
The 80km / h, I think our compatriots will get used to it, as they got used to with the reduction of speed on the device. Because these measures go in the direction of history. Companies have understood this: they train their employees in eco-driving because it generates fewer accidents, less fuel consumption and less wear. In the area of road safety, you have a minority that screams very loudly, but which, in my opinion, hides a majority of drivers who are afraid on the roads and are happy that we can drive slower. Many drivers realize that when driving at 80, they are less stressed, consume less gas and waste no time. But this silent majority is probably not heard enough.
Do you recognize mistakes in five years at the head of Road Safety?
Perhaps too many measures have been adopted. Between 2015 and 2018, we probably took more than 300. Some remain sources of pride for me: in particular the obligation for a company to designate the person who was flashed in a company vehicle. There was a kind of injustice between those who were flashed in a car in their name and those whose car is registered in the name of their company and who did not lose points, and sometimes did not pay a fine. On this measure, I was called Pétain or Bousquet on social networks. But it has drastically reduced the number of flashed service cars, the number of fines and therefore increased safety. There is another very important measure: in the space of five years, we have established agreements with twenty countries of the European Union, which allows us to send fines to millions of foreign drivers flashed on our territory . Result: we see less risky behavior on the part of these motorists.
What would you advise your successor?
To go a lot on the ground. For my part, I visited nearly 70 departments, spent time with the police on the side of the roads, in hospitals to discuss with doctors and volunteers of associations. Road safety is experienced in the field. You cannot conduct this policy only from Paris. You have to be available all the time to explain, to dialogue. Tirelessly.
What new measures will be applied this year?
In April, your license may be immediately suspended if you are caught in the traffic offense (grilled red light, excessive speed, etc.) while you have a mobile phone in hand. The measure that we baptized "Harry Potter" (by reference to his invisibility cloak) should also come into force before the end of the year: it offers the possibility to the police, for alcohol controls and narcotics (and therefore not speed controls) or crime, to make themselves invisible on social networks embedded in cars (Editor's note: like Waze or Coyote) which report them by the roadside.
Where are we with the implementation of the new radars?
400 turret radars (Editor's note: a radar fixed several meters high on a pole) have already been installed since September. And we should have installed 1,200 by the end of the year. Regarding the use of drones, we found that it was not an ideal solution for speed even if it remains used marginally by the police to observe certain dangerous behavior on the road.
Has the ban on scooters on sidewalks paid off?
The fact is that we see them more on the street and that their users therefore put pedestrians less at risk. However, this year there were eight deaths linked to the operation of these electric vehicles and many injured. I think there should be training to learn how to use these devices; and the first thing, beyond the fact that it is illegal, would be not to cut yourself off from others by driving them with headphones. There is also a more general problem in large French cities linked to the sharing of space. The problem today is that everyone is in their own bubble and is not paying attention to the others. Hence the relevance of our new slogan: "Living together. "