Pedestrian organisations in Spain have demanded that the Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT) “immediately” withdraw or amend its Easter campaign, which this time focuses on pedestrians crossing a zebra crossing paying mnore attention to their mobile phones than to what is happening on the road, and have called for “an end to the rhetoric that blames the victims of road violence”.
The Andando Coordination Group — comprising 21 pedestrian associations from Spain and Portugal — has expressed its “deep rejection and concern”. “The video accompanying this campaign is particularly alarming, not only for its message, but for what it omits: the collision depicted takes place at a pedestrian crossing, a space where pedestrians have legal and absolute priority,” it stressed.
The organisation explains in a statement that ‘the narrative constructed shifts the blame onto the person crossing the road, suggesting that their distraction is the cause of the accident, thereby obscuring the decisive role of the driver’. For the organisation, ‘this is not an isolated incident’. ‘This approach is in line with a worrying institutional trend that we had already identified, in which pedestrian accidents are attributed to “carelessness” or mobile phone use, without addressing the structural causes that actually explain them,’ it notes.
Pedestrians say they are ‘tired of this dynamic in which responsibilities are reversed’. ‘Those who suffer the consequences are blamed, whilst those who create the risk are ignored,’ it states. ‘The real factors behind road violence are well known and widely documented: motor vehicles, speeding (a persistent scourge that is insufficiently controlled), road design geared towards maximising the flow of motorised traffic, and a configuration of public space that, all too often, proves hostile to those who walk,’ they argue.
Coordinadora Andando considers that the DGT’s campaign “contradicts the basic principles of contemporary road safety, based on the Safe System and Vision Zero approaches, which recognise that people can make mistakes, but establish that the system must be designed so that such mistakes do not result in deaths or serious injuries”.
‘Blaming the pedestrian for being hit by a vehicle, even in an environment where they have priority, is incompatible with these principles,’ they argue. It also finds it ‘particularly worrying’ that an institution which has formally recognised pedestrians as “vulnerable road users” ‘continues to promote messages that reinforce their vulnerability rather than reducing it’.
‘Protection cannot be based on demanding constant vigilance to survive, but on ensuring safe conditions regardless of individual capabilities,’ it emphasises For all these reasons, the organisation calls for the adoption of campaigns that reflect ‘differential risk responsibility’, focusing on motor vehicles, as well as ‘the reinforcement of messages that guarantee effective respect for pedestrian priority, especially at pedestrian crossings’.
The genuine incorporation of the principles of the Safe System and Vision Zero into all its communication and policy actions, and the formal inclusion of active mobility associations in the Higher Traffic Council that ‘reflect these perspectives and steer the DGT away from a motor vehicle-centred approach’ are among its other demands.