Road safety researchers sound alarm on funding

The Forum of European Road Safety Institutes (FERSI) has raised concerns that road safety research in Europe is no longer delivering what is needed to achieve the ambitious European targets to reduce deaths and injuries. FERSI says that funding for road safety under Horizon Europe, the EU’s main research funding instrument, is alarmingly small and that the focus is primarily on technology development and industrial involvement, which is not balanced. 

As a result, research into the underlying mechanisms of road safety problems and the effectiveness of existing and new countermeasures is either lacking or out of date. FERSI has called on the concerned European bodies to critically reconsider the current scope of research programmes, as well as the selection criteria and procedures. It has also called for additional funding for basic road safety research.

FERSI believes that to keep improving road safety, both technical and non-technical knowledge are essential, and that elaborating on existing knowledge and conducting new research are crucial.