Japan Aims For World's Safest Roads by 2020

TOKYO Mar. 12, 2016; Japan Today reported that the Japanese government announced a plan Friday to reduce the annual number of traffic fatalities to 2,500 or fewer by 2020 and make the country’s roads the safest in the world.

The 10th traffic safety program, covering five years from fiscal 2016 starting April, calls for promoting automatic braking and driving technologies to slash the number of the deaths per 100,000 people in the country to the lowest in the world.

“By steadily implementing the plan, we seek to become the world’s leading safe-traffic society,” said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a meeting on traffic safety measures.

Road accident deaths in Japan rose to 4,117 in 2015, marking the first increase in 15 years, with many elderly victims.

While the figure meant the country failed to achieve the target of 3,000 or fewer deaths set under the current five-year safety program, government officials said they believe they can achieve the new target by improving safety measures targeting the elderly.

The current target number accounts for fatalities within 24 hours of an accident.

The new program simultaneously calls for cutting the number of deaths within 30 days of a traffic accident to 3,000 or less and reducing the total number of casualties to 500,000 or fewer per year.

Among other transport covered by the program, the government plans to make all elevated tracks of major railways quake-resistant by fiscal 2017 in regions that could be hit by major earthquakes.