English-language signs warning of motorcycling risks have appeared along Luxembourg's motorways, part of the Luxembourg national road administration's (Ponts et Chaussées) project to cut down on the high level of motorcycling fatalities.
The signs warn in yellow all-caps "7 motorcyclists killed in 2018. Drive carefully."
Paul Mangen, the deputy-director of this country's national roads administration, known in French as Ponts et Chaussées, explained that the signs have been deployed through the administration's CITA highway monitoring and information system.
While the standard languages the administration uses for communicating to drivers on the motorway are French (on roads to Belgium and France) and German (on roads to Germany), Mangen said his administration felt an increasing need to communicate to drivers from further afield (Belgium, Netherlands, German, the UK) who don't necessarily speak those languages. "They come to Luxembourg for our beautiful roads in the northern parts and for tourism," he explained. "But then they get killed in accidents, so we started to put out signs warning for dangerous areas."
The statistics for 2018 are sobering: of the 20 traffic fatalities of all kinds counted so far this year, fully 7 have been motorcyclists, and many of them were not from Luxembourg. The national government has expressed concern about the number of motorcycling deaths in its report on the road accidents in 2017. This led to the creation of a working group bringing together the ministry of transport, the ministry of sustainable development and infrastructure, the police and Sécurité Routière, Luxembourg's road safety organisation. to tackle the problem.
The roads administration is trying several measures to deal with the risk to motorcyclists. RTL Today described a new project to position motorcyclists on the roadway that is taken from an Austrian innovation. (See links box below.)
But communicating in English was the national roads administration's idea!
