8. The problem of road safety

There's no need to underline the increasingly unacceptable human and economic consequences of road accidents, which, according to the World Health Organization, caused over one million deaths and fifty million injuries worldwide in 2002.

This explains why road safety has been declared a "major national cause" in France, and why in 2002 the French President decided to make it one of the three major priorities of his five-year term.

As this is an issue that cuts across all the activities of road engineers, whether in terms of alignment characteristics, pavement skid resistance, pavement markings, signage quality, etc., we thought it advisable to recall here a certain number of data to be taken into account in specialized articles.