Poland
The European Commission has announced the first ever Urban Road Safety Award nominees. The awards will celebrate outstanding and innovative achievements by local authorities in the area of road safety. The finalists are: Jaworzno (Poland); Ordu (Turkey) and Pontevedra (Spain). The jury praised, in particular, Jaworzno’s action to reduce speed limits, increase the number of public transport users, and involve local residents in the design of renovated streets. Ordu’s “courageous” decision to pedestrianise the busiest parts of the city, remove heavy car traffic from […]
The Prime Minister of Poland has announced that the country’s anomalous night-time 60 km/h speed limits in urban areas will soon be scrapped, as part of a new package of road safety measures. Poland is the only country in Europe with different speed limits in urban areas during the day and at night. The speed limit will be changed to 50 km/h at all times. Hungary, which reduced its urban speed limit from 60 to 50 km/h in 1993, saw a reduction in mean […]
The Polish Prime Minister has promised to make road safety a priority. In a Facebook post on 29 October Mateusz Morawiecki said “A comprehensive plan for the radical improvement of road safety will be one of the government’s priorities in the new term.” Road safety protests were sparked in Warsaw last month after a fatal collision between a BMW car – reportedly being driven at 130 km/h on a road where the speed limit was 50 km/h – and a man pushing a baby […]
Poland is the eighth European country to implement an “emergency corridor” system to clear the way for emergency vehicles on congested roads. The system, which has been shown to reduce response times by 4 minutes, and increase survival rates by 40%, is already used in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Switzerland but was not widely known outside of those countries. The system was a focus of ETSC’s REVIVE project on improving post-collision response and was presented at a number of […]
Road Safety Exchange: Twelve EU Member States team up to tackle challenges including speeding, infrastructure safety and improving the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Twelve EU Member States are joining forces to share smart ideas for improving road safety, as part of a new EU-funded project, launching today in Brussels. Although European roads are the safest in the world and although road safety has improved greatly in recent decades, the number of deaths and serious injuries on our roads is still far too high. […]
Four pairs of engineering students from Italy, Lithuania and Poland have been recognised for projects to redesign and upgrade high-risk road infrastructure in the cities of Milan, Naples, Vilnius and Kraków. The students’ projects were delivered as part of YEARS (Young Europeans Acting for Road Safety), a Europe-wide project on the road safety of young people managed by the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) and the UK’s Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) with the support of the European Commission, the German Road […]
The second REVIVE Round table focused on improving post-collision outcomes in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia In the framework of the REVIVE Project, experts from Emergency Medical Services (EMS), Rescue/Fire Service (RFS) and road transport safety representatives from Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia met in Vienna on 8 November 2017. They discussed the way forward for improving post-collision response and emergency care in Central Eastern Europe. The meeting gathered representatives from Ministries of the Interior, Health, Defence, […]
The ETSC team was saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Ryszard Krystek, who died on 20 January, aged 75. Professor Krystek rose to be one of Poland’s leading experts on road safety. He held the posts of Director of the Institute of Transportation Engineering at the Technical University of Gdansk and Undersecretary of State for Transport Policy at the Polish Ministry of Infrastructure. He led two major strategic national road safety programmes in Poland, known as GAMBIT 96 and GAMBIT 2005. Latterly he was […]
Across Europe there is still a group of hard core drink driving offenders that seem unwilling or unable to change their behaviour despite the use of traditional countermeasures such as awareness campaigns, fines and driving bans. For this group, the introduction of an alcohol interlock programme seems to be an effective measure. Studies have repeatedly shown that alcohol interlock programmes, combined with rehabilitation programmes, cut reoffending rates both during and after the driver has been required to install the device in their vehicle. This […]
Case study: Unilever Poland ETSC’s PRAISE project addresses the safety aspects of driving at work and driving to work. Its aim is to promote best practice in order to help employers secure high road safety standards for their employees. In this interview, Edyta Karpiuk-Jagodzinska, Safety, Health and Environment Coordinator for Poland and the Baltics at Unilever discusses how the organisation has integrated road safety into the heart of its operations. FACTFILE Company: Unilever Poland (2014 ETSC PRAISE Awards – Highly Commended) Sector: Fast Moving Consumer Goods […]
Poland is the latest European country to require convicted drink driving offenders to install an alcohol interlock if they wish to get back behind the wheel. The country joins Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, The Netherlands and Sweden, all of which now have rehabilitation programmes with interlocks backed by the courts. Poland’s new measures came into force on 18 May. Austria, Norway and Switzerland are in the process of preparing similar legislation, and Germany announced a trial programme in February, but no further details have […]
ETSC, The Polish National Road Safety Council and the Polish Motor Transport Institute (ITS) held a round-table event in Warsaw with the aim to raise awareness amongst policy makers, the private sector and key opinion leaders of how to develop a systemic approach to reduce alcohol misuse in road transport. Measures to tackle drink driving such as the use of alcohol interlocks, enforcement, the BAC limit and how to target novice drivers, were on the agenda. Presentations from the event Polish National Road Safety Programme […]