A former Ferrari boss has a blunt message: Your journey is more dangerous than his old job

“When I started as a boy, it was very, very dangerous,” he said. “People aren’t surprised if someone gets killed in a race car.”

That world no longer exists. Decades of relentless engineering, regulatory and safety work have made 200mph scrap piles viable. “Everyone now would be surprised if anyone got hurt in a race car,” Mr. Todd.

Now he wants the same transformation for school trips, motorbike trips, delivery drivers passing through traffic jams – because the numbers on ordinary roads are still the same as in motorbike racing before.

Millions of people were killed and injured

1.2 million people are killed on roads worldwide every year. Another 50 million were injured. The disease is the leading cause of death for children and teenagers aged five to 29 – a toll so constant that Mr. Todt, who currently serves as UN Secretary General Special Envoy for Road Safetycalling it a “silent pandemic going on.”

“Unfortunately, you get used to these situations,” he said.

This week, world leaders and ministers gathered at UN Headquarters in New York for a two-day summit aimed at halving road deaths by 2030, a goal the world has struggled to achieve.

What makes this crisis unusual, according to Todt, is that no one is short of solutions.

“Unlike other pandemics, we have the recipe: education, law enforcement, quality of vehicles, quality of roads, quality of post-accident care,” he said. Properly enforce seat belts, helmets, speed limits and drunk driving regulations, he said, and “we will soon halve the number of victims on the road.”

Ninety percent of road deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where safer roads, stronger laws, and real law enforcement are a long way off.

Start them young

Special Envoys start from a young age. “If you educate a boy or girl, six, seven, eight years old, then they will soon know how to behave,” he said, and most importantly, they pass it on to the adults who accompany them.

But education without consequences is useless, he warned. “If society knows that they can behave badly without consequences, there is no reason to change.” Corruption, he added dryly, “cannot work with” effective law enforcement.

New risks keep coming. E-bikes, e-scooters and app-based delivery people, often paid to order and racing around the clock, sometimes without helmets, have added new dangers to city streets. Self-driving cars may eventually help, Todt said, but it won’t happen anytime soon, and it won’t happen when the worst of the crisis hits: countries are still using aging vehicle fleets and patchy public transport.

Speak

Even within his own institution, Todt says road safety is still hard to hear. “Many times I travel, I meet with UN teams and I say, ‘I will be the first to talk about road safety.’ Most of the time, I’m right.”

His speech, devoid of jargon, was essentially one that changed his old sport: death is never inevitable, and neither is death.

“Prevention is important,” he said. It took decades for the motor racing world to believe that. He hoped the journey wouldn’t take long.