The statistics are clear: more people die on the roads in the South Moravian Region than anywhere else.  The first quarter of this year was not an exception: of the 192 people killed on Czech roads, one-fifth of them (47 people) were in South Moravia.  This region held this unfavourable primacy in the statistics for all of the past year (235 of 1,215 fatalities, i.e., 19 %).  The City of Brno “leads” in the overall number of traffic accidents – nearly 9 thousand of them happened there in 2004.  The district of Greater Brno shows the second largest number of fatalities in the Czech Republic, next only to Ostrava.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transportation, Ing. Milan Šimonovský, decided to remedy the situation in the region in which he lives.  The Ministry’s Road Safety Department prepared several projects designed specifically for the South Moravian Region and for the city of Brno.

“The road safety situation in South Moravia is not good, and I view its improvement as my personal priority,” replied the Minister to the question as to why Brno was placed in the “Safe Town” project.  This project ties into the National Road Safety Strategy, which has an ambitious goal – to decrease the number of fatalities on Czech and Moravian roads by one half by 2010, as compared to 2004.  “One of my main goals is to significantly decrease the number of fatalities on the roads, so that their number would drop by fifty percent by 2010,” said Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transport, Ing. Milan Šimonovský, and he added: “The alarming numbers of people dying on the roads are also caused by failure to adhere to the speed limit in towns.”

“Safe Town” is the name of a project which the Minister introduced in Brno this year.  Its goal is to involve municipalities and their inhabitants and other organisations in dealing with the problem of road safety.  It ties into the “Healthy Town” project, in which the City of Brno already participates.  Many institutions have shown interest in similar projects.

Road safety is an issue in which a number of artists are getting involved, who are not indifferent to the situation: today’s concert of the Brno band, Kamelot, serves as evidence.