A fund to support road injury prevention activities

Road victim’s associations represent the most important road safety measure. I wish there were no victims whatsoever, of course, so they did not exist, but as victims keep adding we still need the associations to re-center the debate, support victims, and motivate us.

As many other NGOs, road victim’s associations suffer from a lack of internal or stable funding. Even if organizations such as mine try to be understanding, sensitive and supportive and already collaborate with several of them, the need for funding is far from being matched by the existing level of support.

Let me bring you some quick figures (most of then taken from the recently published Statistical General Report 2023 published by the Spanish Directorate General for Traffic, https://www.dgt.es/menusecundario/dgt-en-cifras/dgt-en-cifras-resultados/dgt-en-cifras-detalle/Anuario-Estadistico-General-de-2023/):

What???? How many?

Registrations?????? 1,467,570

Change of ownership????? 3,823,691

Scrapped vehicles??????????? 1,147,282

New driving licenses?????? 872,316

Fines????? 5,148,399

So far, around 12.5 million “transactions”, if you allow me to use this term.

To this amoung, we could add to the above table the renewals of driving licenses (around 3,000,000 drivers in 2022, own estimations) and the number of vehicle undertaking technical inspections (21,826,484 in 2022 according to https://www.aeca-itv.com/sala-de-prensa/noticia/el-814-de-los-vehiculos-supera-la-itv-favorablemente-en-la-primera-inspeccion/).

Adding all this up, we obtain 12.5 + 3.0 + 21.8 = 37.3 transactions aprox.

We do not need to squeeze much our brains to keep adding factors to the sum…

What if, as a lot of companies, supermarkets and other business already do, we offer the citizens the possibility or rounding up the cost of each of those transactions to the nearest euro and support road victim’s associations?

This means that if you pay, for instance, 55.70 euros for changing the ownership of the vehicle and you accept to round up that cost, you end up paying 56.00 euros (an additional 30 cents). Or if you pay 94.05 euros to obtain your first driving license, and you accept to round up that cost, you end up paying 95.00 euros instead of 94.05 (equivalent to 95 cents more). On average, each person that accepts to round up the corresponding fee would pay 50 cents more.

Let us assume that this solidarity campaign is properly published and the citizens “buy it”. But let us be moderately ambitious and accept than only 10% of the citizens opt in for the round-up. This would mean that around 1.865 million euros would be collected and used to support road injury prevention activities and road victim’s associations.

Any comments would be much appreciated.

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