Reducing the number of people killed in traffic should be uncontroversial. Indeed, yesterday the United Nations’ General Assembly passed a near-unanimous declaration of this, following a two-day meeting on improving global road safety.
It was near unanimous because while 162 member states voted in favor, there was one holdout. The U.S. was the single country to cast a vote against. Even Argentina, which has followed the U.S. lead in attempting to pull out of the UN’s World Health Organization, voted for the declaration (while delivering a caveat about national sovereignty).
The declaration reiterates a global goal: to at least halve road traffic deaths and injuries between 2021 and 2030. It also calls for governments to assign and fund a lead agency for coordinating road safety, to improve public transport systems, and to make other pledges for safer roads (48 in total). The document draws attention to the people who are most exposed to traffic violence, including those walking, wheeling, cycling, working, and heading to or from school on the roads.
Dan Negrea, a U.S. representative to the UN, had harsh words for the assembly. Negrea sought asylum in the U.S. after leaving Romania, where he had been a government official; he then spent decades on Wall Street. At the UN General Assembly yesterday, he charged that this type of global road-safety effort was being mixed with climate action.
Yes, cutting down on traffic, for instance through clean-air zones, will reduce both lives lost on the roads and lives lost due to air pollution. In this case, what’s good for the environment is clearly also good for our health. But just on public health grounds alone, the world shares a motivation to make the roads safer—though that motivation isn’t always turned into action.
Indeed, Negrea referred to the declaration as both a “symbolic global gesture” and “a backdoor vehicle to enforce global climate pacts and top-down environmental restrictions on freedom of mobility.” In other words, he complained that it was both an empty gesture and its opposite: a means of enforcement.
Negrea’s comments may be internally inconsistent, but they are consistent with a federal administration that has pulled funding for bike lanes and pedestrian safety, and attempted to turn road safety into another culture-war flashpoint, rather than a health issue that touches people of all political stripes. Negrea’s animosity at the UN also recalls his America-first pledge at his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing to bring “belief in American exceptionalism” and “an unapologetic defense of America’s sovereignty” to the UN.
Negrea may however be correct about the declaration being just a symbolic gesture, if governments don’t put up the money and risk the political headwinds to actually put these recommendations into practice. The toll of inaction is staggering. Globally, over a million people were killed on roads in 2025. While 10 countries have reached the 50% reduction target early, the world as a whole is far off track. And in the U.S., pedestrian death rates show that it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to walk on the roads.
This is no act of God. Road-traffic deaths are preventable, through strengthening of public transit, improvement of trauma care, adoption of existing technology and especially thoughtful road design, which can be as cheap and simple as narrowing lanes to reduce speeds.
The recommendations laid out in the declaration show that we know what to do to turn the tide on road deaths. And almost all countries at least say they want to do it.
