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Why was IRSC established ?
Despite the best efforts of all the parties involved, many LMIC countries and their major cities continue to have huge road safety problems and will struggle to meet the road safety requirements of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Global road safety performance targets. There is a need to assist such countries to develop the road safety capacity/ knowledge of their key officials and technical experts and to stimulate / encourage a more scientific approach by initiating research on road safety issues so that they can take more effective action. Development bank loans do often include safety components and some capacity building, but the training provided within such loans can be short, inconsistent and of variable quality. There is a need to take a more comprehensive, longer term and more sustainable approach to assist road safety capacity building and to ecourage road safety research.
Use of IRSC teaching materials will ensure that university students graduating are already familiar with road safety issues and able to assist in their improvement. Teaching materials could even include introduction to road safety tools such as road safety audit (RSA), road safety inspection(RSI) and road safety impact assessment (RSIA ) so that young engineers coming out of universities do not repeat the mistakes of earlier generations who, unfamiliar with such concepts and preventive safety tools, continued adding to unsafe roads after graduation. Materials will also ensure that Traffic police students can learn about crash scene investigation and understand the need to collect good data from crash sites. They will also learn about the importance of sharing data with others who can develop safety initiatives in their sectors while Police use it for data led enforcement activities targeting the most unsafe road user behaviours.