Road safety – The 22 pills of Dr Heitz –

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The 22 pills of Dr. Heitz

Road safety - The 22 pills of Dr Heitz -

The round table entitled Motorcycle and road safety: self-respect, respect for others, organized yesterday by the DSCR with a hundred speakers, gave birth to 250 proposals, 22 of which should be studied soon. Balance sheet.

Restricted a few years ago to a small circle of crazy people persisting in their corner to ride on two wheels, despite the most elementary laws of physics, the motorcycle more and more intrigues the public authorities….

Spurred on by the "national site"defined by the President of the Republic and surfing on the number one value of the beginning of the century – safety – the government strives to integrate into its thinking this growing fringe of road users, including the rate of fatalities "falsify" its stats by decreasing less quickly than that of motorists (read)…

So much so that the Directorate of Road Safety and Traffic (DSCR), attached to the Ministry of Transport, yesterday organized a "Round table"titled, much like those flyers handed out in tough colleges,"Respect for oneself, respect for others"…

Around a hundred stakeholders more or less representative of the motorcycle world (FFMC, FFM, Moto Zen, League against road violence, Anne Cellier Junior Foundation, Paris Police Prefecture, INRETS, CERTU, AXA, etc.), divided into five workshops, therefore spent the morning reflecting in a basement of the Grande Arche de la Defense. "In each workshop, we were all able to come up with a series of ideas", explains one of the speakers."Then, as at Eurovision, we noted the best proposals! Each speaker could thus award 4 points to the best, 3 to the next, then 2, then 1". Thus, in the workshop devoted to"biker and motorcycle equipment", suddenly resurfaced the idea of ​​technical control for motorcycles, proposed only by three people but benefiting from a large pool of points awarded by these same stakeholders, while the majority was firmly opposed to it…

The work of the five workshops was then summarized by the interministerial delegate for road safety Remy Heitz and presented to the ministers of transport and sports, who will see "what concrete benefits they can bring".

"I am well aware that this synthesis is a bit of a catalog à la Prevert", recognized the interministerial delegate by outlining the 22 measures deemed to be priorities, among which we find the rise of queues (which will be the subject of a"working group in the coming weeks to clarify the rules regarding this practice", promised Gilles de Robien), the homologation of cyclists at 60 km / h instead of 45 (violent raising of the eyebrows of the said minister!), the reduction of the VAT to 5.5% on helmets (demanded since years by the FFMC and today relayed by Motorcycle Journal), modification of car and motorcycle licenses (to make motorists better understand the specificities of motorcyclists and vice versa), better consideration of two-wheelers in urban and territorial developments and "need to think about motorcycle technical control"in the words of the Minister of Transport…

Finally, note the emphasis placed on the opening of circuits, a project dear to Christophe Guyot who chaired the workshop "A specific communication towards bikers" (read and).

"Five circuits will be open during the road safety week in October"with the help of the State via the National Sports Development Fund (FNDS), promised the Minister of Sports Jean-François Lamour."We will then see how to integrate this project into an annual calendar. But from 2007 it will be necessary to assess the impact, particularly on young bikers, before making this practice sustainable. Because it is very expensive to open the circuits and their managers have financial imperatives".

"You had a lot of courage to stay locked in this room instead of being outside on your motorcycle in this beautiful weather. !", for his part concluded the Minister of Transport Gilles de Robien by inviting observers to"not to be selective in the interpretation of this day and not to make trial of intentions. Remy Heitz and his team will now focus on examining the 250 measures, tweaking them and implementing them if they are applicable.".

"It is also necessary to improve the image of the biker", said the Minister of Transport:"bikers must understand our effort to rehabilitate their image, which must not be tarnished by the behavior of some because it would be as counterproductive as a minister who advocates road safety and who gets caught in speeding like that we arrived ! (read) Now with the chip on my Vel Satis, you can check that I respect the limitations !"

Eric MICHEL

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