Mexico: Sustainable and safe mobility for all in 2030

Arturo Cervantes, Chairman of the Board of ANASEVI, the National Alliance for Road Safety in Mexico, gives the Intertraffic community an unparalleled insight into how the country is prioritising safety above everything else ahead of November’s Intertraffic Mexico show.

In the last decade or so, we've been organising and pushing towards major commitments on this topic in this country. Mexico has just passed a new general law on road safety and mobility as part of the concept of using Agenda 2030 as a vision for longer term plans. ‘Sustainable and safe mobility for all in 2030’ is our model and we are planning to develop a space for knowledge and for networking among key stakeholders from the private sector that are working on improving mobility and creating a roadway to safety. This is being achieved as a result of working together with the government at different levels, Federal, State and Municipal, to see what are the best practices and what kind of infrastructure projects are currently going on in the country.

Mexico consists of 32 states and over 2500 municipalities - it's a huge country where mobility is progressing at different rates in different areas, and the needs are totally diverse

THE LAY OF THE LAND – MEXICO IN A NUTSHELL

As for Mexico’s constitution we have 32 states and over 2500 municipalities - it's a huge country. Mobility is progressing at different rates in different areas, and the needs are totally diverse. We are promoting a multi-sectoral approach using the aforementioned SDGs as 11 of them are related, directly or otherwise, to road safety.

We have a mid-term vision towards 2030 where we could get the private sector, the public sector and the academic world to discuss and to work towards sustainable mobility for all.

Many Mexican companies in the mobility sector are already aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (specifically SDGs 2, 3, 6-9 and 11). There are different viewpoints of how sustainable mobility, intelligent mobility, the future of mobility has the human person at its centre. The costs of not doing anything keeps increasing and it is estimated by organisations such as the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) that the social and economic cost of having unsustainable and unsafe mobility systems in our countries and in our cities is around 3% of GDP.

It’s not about the huge amounts of money lost or even the lives lost - it's about the people who become extremely poor or who pay catastrophic damages

It’s not about the huge amounts of money lost or even the lives lost - it's about the people who become extremely poor or who pay catastrophic damages. It is estimated that for every death, there's over 30 seriously injured people that end up in hospital. For every death, there's a couple of disabilities, people that end up in wheelchairs or with limitations to their mobility. But the good news is that in November in Mexico City we will be discussing the solutions, the vaccines against this epidemic. We will have an amazing Congress and Expo and we’ll also be visiting some major sites in the infrastructure development in the country.