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The Italian Transport Commission has recently approved a resolution which obligates the government to give up on the so called “killer barriers”. The goal of the measure is to reduce the vulnerability of potential victims, which means developing a safer passive security for the infrastructure. Passive security implies that the infrastructure must not become a factor which would increase the danger for the population, after a road accident. After Italy and Spain, a country which adopted a similar approach, we might thing that Romania could take the same steps. Considering that we are still in the learning curve, when it comes to highway construction, the smartest think would be that these were built according to the new safety issues for motorcycles. In the countries with a large road network, infrastructure has a risk factor of 30-40% in the matter of road accidents. This percentage is unknown in Romania’s case. There are many technical solutions for that problem, so nothing new needs to be invented. It is already common knowledge that traffic accidents have a negative impact on a countries internal revenue, and in a country as Romania the negative impact on economic growth is between 1.2 and 1.7%. Returning to the bikers, they called these killer barriers “guillotines”. Even if it is a minor accident, and a bikers hits a side wall at only 25 km/h, the wall would act like a guillotine. This would lead to fatal injury. The injuries provoked by these kind of accidents are usually five times more serious than other bike accidents and up to 80 times more serious than a car passenger would have. It’s been proved that biker friendly systems decrease mortality rate by half and are financially very affordable. The estimated cost of a meter of normal side wall is between 60 and 100 euro, while the additional safety system costs only 25 euro per meter. In Great Britain, for example, the cost for such a system is recovered in only ten weeks. This safety technologies will become a standard of safety. Such a measure would increase the trust rate in road infrastructure, thing which will be obvious when larger number of road enthusiasts will visit our countries, Transfarasanul and Transalpina being only two examples.
