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Anastasia Balezdrova

This year, Greece marked the International Road Safety week of the United Nations with 21 serious accidents, 34 accidents in which drivers and passengers were seriously injured and 220 crashes with minor injuries. This is the sad list of the Easter holiday travelling despite the call "all to return" which echoed on all radio stations in the country.

Greece is one of the countries with the highest number of road accidents in Europe. Civil organizations and government bodies hold campaigns and continually raise the fines for violating the traffic rules but the "blood" tax, which the Greeks pay each year on the road, is very high.

GRReporter met with Manolis Stavroulakis, a member of the society of relatives of victims of traffic crimes. For the people who have lost loved ones the term 'accident' does not exist.
 
According to Manolis, in Greece the attitude of the authorities responsible for road accidents is zero. "It is believed that this has been the fate of those who died. Accidents, however, are neither AIDS, nor any epidemic. They are caused by the people. Either the drivers or the constructers of the roads, or the municipal authorities, that place columns and other obstacles could be blamed. All these people have names and surnames, but nobody has been convicted of irresponsible attitude so far.

At the same time, none of those authorities responsible for ensuring road safety is doing anything substantial. Their role is limited to participation in congresses and meetings, which just announce statistics. There is no official in the municipalities to handle this real problem, or if there is one he or she performs his or her duties only formally. These people usually engage in limiting the costs of the municipality in this direction or increasing the revenue from road use without ever paying attention to road safety. So, I think that when the state itself is dealing with the road network at the expense of human life, it is not possible to take any measures for road safety.

Manolis believes that it could not be talked about measures to enhance road safety in a country where the training for driving vehicles is insufficient and many of the people give bribes to obtain driving licenses. "We do not put seat belts, we give bribes in order the car to pass the annual revision, although it is not in the required condition, we pass in the red light, we drive with high speeds. I do not think these problems could be solved only with the imposition of fines. It is all about the attitude of each individual person. If the issue of road safety does not become a problem of the society, if each individual citizen does not realize that he or she could be in the place of the victim at any time, we could not talk about a positive change."
 
Manolis got engaged in the road safety issue in 2005 when his son lost his life after crashing in billboard advertising. In 2008, he and the lawyer Athanasios Tsiokos, who also lost his son in such a crash, managed to force the authorities to implement the law and to remove billboards from the streets. He said that 27 people died in crashes with advertising billboards only in Athens since 2005. "These are data that I gathered myself. There is no official statistics, because there is none. It is mentioned nowhere that a person has died in a collision in a roadside obstacle. It is just written that the victim got out of the roadway and died."

According to the road safety observatory at the Technical Chamber of Greece, 12% of the accidents are due to the outdoor advertising. According to Manolis, three young people died and dozens were injured only in the municipality of Maroussi just in the last few years, and yet "the municipalities continue to place more and more because they profit from that."

"The roads in Greece were full of such billboards until a few years ago, although there should be nothing on the road that could distract the driver. This is said in the traffic regulations in all countries, this is stressed in the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, and this is what the Supreme Court stated."

"But sidewalks are still full of plates that everyone place as he or she pleases. Owners of restaurants and even gas stations place such plates. If we ask a driver what distracts his or her attention the most, he or she would answer that these are the signs at gasoline stations with the help of which he or she seeks the cheapest gasoline. Three such accidents in which the drivers were killed have happened only recently."
 
The fight of Manolis Stavroulakis and Athanasios Tsiokos against the advertising billboards inspired the journalist Manolis Andriotakis to film a documentary titled "Warning: Killing ads."

Before the campaign of the two men, there were 30,000 billboards only in Athens and 150,000 in Greece. Now their society has decided to put a huge stamp saying "SOSte", in Greek "save," at any place where these accidents occur.