The municipality of Siero in Asturias, Spain, has been honored with the DEKRA Vision Zero Award. The DEKRA road safety experts are recognizing the city’s achievement of zero traffic fatalities in eleven consecutive years from 2009 to 2019. This is the fifth time that the leading international expert organization has presented this award in combination with the presentation of its annual DEKRA Road Safety Report. This year, the event was held online.
- Mayor: “More space for people, less for cars”
- Objective of zero traffic fatalities being achieved in many cities worldwide
- Interactive map featuring 25 countries at www.dekra-vision-zero.com
For the interactive world map at www.dekra-vision-zero.com, the DEKRA experts continuously evaluate the latest available accident statistics. For many European countries, as well as the USA, Japan, Canada, Mexico and Australia, the map shows the towns and cities with over 50,000 inhabitants that have achieved zero traffic fatalities in at least one year since 2009. Siero in Northern Spain has around 52,000 inhabitants.
Yvonne Rauh, Managing Director with DEKRA España, presented the award to the mayor of the Concejo de Siero, Angel Antonio García Gonzalez. “We have been working hard to limit speeds in the central areas and to promote bike lanes and pedestrian zones”, said the mayor. “We don’t drive as fast as we would like, but in the end what we want is to allocate more space for people and less for cars, so that where they coexist, the car is not the protagonist. In Spain, cities have always been designed with respect to the car. Our objective, which we continue to work for, is to change this configuration of urban centers.“
Former recipients of the DEKRA Vision Zero Award are the cities of Kerpen (Germany), Torrejon de Ardoz (Spain), Bad Homburg (Germany) and Lüdenscheid (Germany). “Overall, of course, ‘Vision Zero’ has not yet been achieved, but our award-winners, as well as many other towns and cities worldwide are testament to the fact that it is not merely some Utopian concept,” said DEKRA CEO Stefan Kölbl. “Our data shows that more than 1,100 towns and cities in the 25 countries analyzed have already partially achieved the objective of zero deaths on the road within their sphere of responsibility. The fact remains, however, that any traffic fatality is one too many.” Kölbl emphasized that efforts have to be sustained in order to come closer to “Vision Zero” in even more towns and cities as well as outside of urban centers.
