Road Safety Reporting

The Road Safety Reporting Initiative aims to help journalists tell more and better stories that ultimately help reduce deaths from road crashes.

Nearly 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic crashes each year - more than 2 every minute - and road crashes are the leading cause of death among children and young adults aged 5-29. 

Despite this, public clamour for change rarely matches the scale of the crisis. Road safety has a narrative problem, and this is reflected in how road crashes are reported in the media.

News reports often frame fatal crashes as unavoidable 'accidents' rather than preventable tragedies with systemic causes and proven solutions. They also tend to blame individual road users, rather than infrastructure and the rules of the road that shape how people behave. 

Small structural changes to how road collisions are covered in news reports can have a big impact on how the public responds to them and the level of demand for evidence-based action. 

These changes include avoiding the term ‘accident,’ providing more context, such as the number of recent fatalities in the area, and touching on systemic issues such as infrastructure, laws, policies and solutions.

Editors, journalists and increasingly, influencers, have a crucial role to play in framing road safety is an urgent and solvable public health crisis, boosting accountability and driving demand for life-saving actions.

As part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety, the initiative offers training and mentoring for journalists, as well as resources, data, contacts, and links to innovative tools and technologies. 

WHO has worked with the International Centre for Journalists, The Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, the Solutions Journalism Network and other partners to produce road safety reporting guidelines, tools, stories and the global road safety reporting contest and awards.

WHO shares stories, studies and training opportunities through newsletters, an X feed and on LinkedIn.