Person over 65 years of age, dressed in dark clothing that walks near his house alongside roadsides, without a reflective vest and crosses outside the pedestrian crossings. It is the most common profile of fatalities due to abuse in Galicia, one of the accidents in which the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) focuses its awareness campaigns. So far this year, five pedestrians have died in the community, wounded by a vehicle, which in only two months accounts for 35% of the 14 fatalities in all of 2015.
None of them wore a vest, so from Traffic they have decided to reinforce the awareness of the pedestrians about the importance of making themselves visible to the drivers with a joint campaign with the Junta that includes the distribution of 2,000 vests during this year -400 before Week Santa- and talks in the town councils, especially in those that concentrate more black points of outrages. It will be an information campaign in which it will not be fined, although in the cases of recidivists “other measures will have to be taken”, according to warned yesterday the Government delegate in Galicia, Santiago Villanueva.
Traffic last year designed a risk map of abuses involving half a hundred Galician town councils. As explained yesterday by the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard Association of Traffic in Galicia, Javier Molino, the actions in the most conflictive nuclei with the reinforcement of the surveillance or the improvement of the infrastructures explain that in the current map only repeat five municipalities, despite the fact that the total number round again half a hundred when analyzing the 170 serious and slight violations of 2015.
The dispersion in Galicia, the aging of the population and the complex road network – with 17,000 kilometers of main network and 55,000 of interurban and local – are, according to Villanueva explains, the causes that explain the high numbers of abuses in the community although it qualified That the 14 pedestrians killed in 2015 are three less than the previous year and 72% below the 50 recorded in 2005.
Molino points out that these “singularities” place Galicia five points above the national average each year in terms of deaths due to abuses. For this reason, it is important to insist that users use these elements also when it is daytime – not only from dusk, when it is obligatory due to the loss of visibility – in order to avoid any failure of the driver.
In the educative talks, the agents will remind the elderly people of the importance of always wearing a safety vest and also walking on the left and in case there is always a circular walk through it. This group is the most vulnerable to abuse by having less mobility to react and less vision to calculate the distance of the vehicle. In addition to the talks focused on this group, for Lieutenant Colonel Molino it is “fundamental” that the environment of the elderly remind them how to walk and cross the road. In the same vein, the head of Traffic in A Corunna and head of the DGT in Galicia, Victoria Gomez Debarred, said that “family support” helps to overcome the “rejection” of the elderly to the vest for being “a Flashy garment “but that can be your” lifesaver “.
The Ministry of Environment will put the 2,000 vests of the campaign available to the agents, an action included in the road safety plan 2016-2020 of the Junta that also plans to build 170 kilometers of pedestrian paths. The Ethel insisted that nothing can substitute “the caution” of pedestrians and drivers. In the case of the latter, lowering the speed to 50 km / h where there are houses and people transit reduces by half the number of pedestrians killed.