Celebrating Our Drive to Save Lives

Together for Safer Roads Rang Nasdaq Closing Bell with Corporate Members and Public-Sector Partners

By: David Braunstein, Together for Safer Roads President

On Monday, August 6, I had the tremendous honor to be at Nasdaq—thanks to member company CalAmp for the special opportunity.

Together for Safer Roads is a global coalition on a mission to help make the world’s roads safer for all people; and at Nasdaq, we celebrated our collective efforts in making this mission a reality.

Most of us understand how important transportation is to our communities and to our economies. At the same time, many people don’t realize that collisions on the world’s roads have become a serious global health issue and a major economic challenge. Communities around the world, including New York City, are rallying to these challenges. And we are making excellent progress in places.

But our progress is uneven. On the world’s roads every year, roughly 1.25 million people die and 50 million people are injured. In the United States each year, tens of thousands of our friends, family members, and colleagues perish in traffic-related incidents.

Worldwide, traffic crashes remain the number one killer of young people. And in many countries, 50% of deaths are vulnerable road users – people walking the streets, riding bicycles, and using motorcycles to get around.

Together for Safer Roads was founded by forward-thinking companies that believe these crashes and fatalities are preventable. I am proud to have some of the world’s most capable, purpose-driven companies, public-sector leaders, and industry experts working with us to save lives.

We believe businesses large and small, multinational and regional, can and should drive change – change that goes beyond what gets measured in a typical financial report. Together, we are sharing data, expertise, technology, and our business networks to become a global resource for road safety problem solving.

We are leveraging member companies’ collective insights to advance best practices for safer companies and their fleets.

We are combining the best of coalition thinking, with the best technologies from early-stage companies, to create a new proving ground for reducing traffic crashes and fatalities.

We are partnering with our public-sector colleagues around the world to implement comprehensive road safety initiatives and to test targeted interventions.

But, there is much work left to be done. Our communities need more help, more of this commitment. At Together for Safer Roads, we think of road safety as a team sport, a sport that has no limit to the number of players taking the field.

We hope that all of you will consider joining our team. Join us in our shared mission to tip the balance—to save millions of lives—to bring our friends, family members, and colleagues home safely every day.