Our society loses its future in the streets and routes of the country in an endless succession of crashes, overturns, run overs, collisions, falls and forgetfulness.
Every day young and very young people die or suffer injuries in road accidents that in almost all cases could have been avoided, and statistics from the National Road Safety Agency demonstrate this with figures that, not because they are similar to those of other countries, are less dramatic.
In the preliminary study provided by the ANSV for the year 2022, the age range is shaken.
37% of the fatalities, or 4 out of every 10 deaths at the scene, were between 15 and 34 years of age.
These are human expectations cut short in the prime of life that have left hundreds of families destroyed.
This painful road scourge also causes a high number of deaths among people between 35 and 54 years of age, since 27% of the fatalities were in those age ranges.
Lives lost in full labor activity that left an irreplaceable void in their families and in the functions they fulfilled in society.
In 2022 there were 3,828 deaths in road incidents, not counting the number of severely injured, who died days later.
The numbers of survivors are also shocking.
Year after year there are no less than 100,000 injured people who are left in the care of the public health system, and another constant is that half of those who die are the most vulnerable road users: pedestrians, cyclists and, above all, motorcyclists.
It is incomprehensible that these data go by, made invisible, and continue to be absent from political discourse and media analyses.
In fact, in the electoral campaign that is beginning the candidates have not mentioned the scourge.
That is not talked about.
At most they use it as a fireship against the opponent.
Incomprehensible trivializations that seek the wink of the followers in the networks.
And for this reason, they point against the breathalyzer controls and say that they are useless because they stop the flow of vehicles, they also criticize the islets to calm traffic on the avenues, or they claim that the speed of circulation does not have maximum speeds because the regulation affects personal freedom .
Few journalists have the will to stop these intemperate voices of those who think they know what's going on and, strictly speaking, know nothing.
Parodying road risk factors such as drink driving and high speeds from a public platform is really a fool's thing because they are the main causes of road trauma.
In fact, the insistence of the UN/WHO campaigns to lower speeds in the world is based on the following relationship: each increase of 1% in speed results in an increase of 3.5% to 4% in deaths.
Only 4% of pedestrians are unharmed from an impact at 48Km/h and none at 64Km/h.
Survivors deserve much more attention, containment and protection, and their excruciating living conditions require sustainable prevention policies that mitigate road trauma and debate it as a priority on the electoral political agenda .
Ema Cibotti is president of Activvas, a civil association against road violence
Mateo Fernando Torres Mantykow (26) died after being run over in Palermo.
2/4/2023.