The ANIA Foundation for road safety, funded in 2004 by insurance companies, aims at tackling the emergency caused by road crashes at the national level, by addressing road safety as a system. The Foundation's objective is to identify and implement activities that can contribute concretely to the attainment of better levels of safety on the roads, in particular through prevention and enforcement policies. To tackle road crashes, the ANIA Foundation deploys concrete projects and initiatives aimed at mobilising public opinion, offering better training to drivers, and educate all road users about the Highway Code. The Foundation also collaborates with the major national and local authorities to help them address the needs of road users and to improve the infrastructure across the Italian territory. The ANIA Foundation has partnerships with the following major institutions: The Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, the Police, the city of Rome, the city of Milan, and so on.
Offering good training to drivers is particularly important for ANIA and is a central theme for all our activities.
Toughening sanctions, a type of measure that has been carried during the past few years, is necessary but does not suffice. Together with it we must invest in building a culture of road safety and in preparing future drivers. For that purpose AINA has developed education projects with children.
Building from that, we have also reached out to teenagers through our "online driving license" project. ANIA has prepared an e-learning platform to help candidates prepare for their driving exam, and rendered access to it available for free in all schools.
Powered Two-Wheelers (PTWs) is another theme that the insurance companies and ANIA are particularly keen on addressing, beyond improving theoretical training, ANIA therefore inaugurated the "ANIA Campus" offering a space for high school children to safely practice driving PTWs. In such a way the need for mandatory practical training before obtaining a driving licence can be demonstrated.
We also focused on 18 to 26 year olds with our "Novice Drivers" project. The ANIA Foundation developed a driving simulator that helps novice drivers, via an internet connection or a CD, develop and test their skills and awareness of dangers that are found on the roads by taking a virtual driving journey. Following this, the 300 most successful participants won a safe driving course.
The ANIA Foundation addresses, with its "Black Point" project, the problems related to our roads network. With this project ANIA wants to voice road users concerns. A website was built (www.smaniadisicurezza.it), an email account, a phone number, a number for text messaging and video messaging, and a postal address were created to allow citizens who detect high risk sites to contact us and share their experiences. On the basis of this information we can then contact the regional authorities responsible for road management and ask them to remove the dangers identified. All the citizens who have contacted us are then informed of the progress following their queries.
Since 2004, The ANIA Foundation has been running the "I drive carefully" project that has at its core the "designated driver" concept and communicates the negative impact of alcohol on driving. Throughout the summer and the end of year holiday, the most popular nightclubs across the country are equipped with breath testing equipment that allow young people to check their BAC levels prior to driving. Also, the young men and women who volunteer at the beginning of the evenings to drive their friends home are given a bright sign with written "designated driver" written on it. They then receive a prize at the end of the evening if they maintain their promise not to drink. The project is run together with the traffic police that toughen breath tests on the roads simultaneously, and offer free entries to nightclubs to drivers who are sober.
4.1. Professionals on the roads
Road safety at work is a theme that is receiving increasing attention.
One out of two work related death occurs on the roads. This encompasses both road crashes during a person’s journey to or from work, and road crashes on duty (when a vehicle is driven for work-related purposes).
Safety in the work place therefore coincides with road safety a great deal.
For that reason we have intervened in the sphere of Heavy Good Vehicles (HGVs). The proportion of crashes involving HGVs is rather small but the outcome of such crashes is always very severe. This theme was addressed in two ways.
First, training courses for HGV drivers that do not only include driving skills but also other aspects that are considered very important by insurance companies: drivers’ diets, driving postures, eyesight checkups and so on.
Second, to monitor accidents statistics better, the ANIA Foundation has installed accident black boxes on 1,000 HGVs in 2007, and another 1,000 will be installed in 2008/2009.
We have only mentioned some of the actions developed and deployed by ANIA, without mentioning the various promotional activities that we also conduct to involve all the stakeholders who should be concerned by road safety.
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