Jenny Jones: If we have memorials to rail crashes, why not to the dead on the roads?

From a speech given by the Green member of the London Assembly to a conference organised by RoadPeace, at Church House, London

The monument to commemorate road crash victims is one of London's missing landmarks. The absence speaks volumes about the emotional bypass that justifies our choice of cars over people and metal over flesh.

We have numerous statues to the British soldiers who died in the First World War, but nothing to the larger number of men, women and children who have died on Britain's roads since then. We have monuments to recent tragedies, such as the Paddington rail crash, but not to the thousands of people who have been dying for decades in an everyday slaughter on the streets.

Thirty five people died at Paddington and Hatfield and the media rightly switched on the political heat; yet 299 people died on London's roads last year, and journalists ask me where is the story? I don't understand it. The only road incident that has got any large-scale publicity and attention in recent years is Selby, where a driver fell asleep at the wheel and caused a passenger train to crash.

Of course the voices of the victims should be heard and action taken. But the main solution is not better fences to keep the trains safe, it is to challenge a culture where driving whilst half asleep probably accounts for 300 deaths and many thousands of injuries a year. It is a strange twist of fate that a rail crash should prompt the Government finally to do something about the road deaths of long-distance drivers who are the tired victims of the biggest occupational killer of any industry.

So why do the politicians care so much about human life on the railways and so little about it on the roads? Thirty five people die in two rail crashes and the world changes; Railtrack slides into the hands of the administrators and hundreds of millions of pounds are devoted to making our train journeys the safest form of transport. Why is it that when we step outside the station doors our lives simply aren't worth as much? That you can almost hear the zeros falling off the budgets, as the millions turn to thousands?

Why does the Metropolitan Police regard car theft as a priority and have targets for recovering stolen vehicles, but does not see reducing road casualties as a priority? None of us would agree to put property before life, but that is what society does. There were 299 deaths on London's roads last year compared to 171 murders, but this is not a priority for the Home Office, which sees traffic offences more like misdemeanours than proper crimes.

Even the normally prudent Treasury doesn't ask why we spend so little preventing road deaths and injuries, when it was estimated to have cost the NHS in London alone over £87m. This excludes the economic costs to the London economy and the immeasurable personal costs of devastated lives.

None of this is recent news and it would be wrong to blame individual ministers, police commissioners or newspaper editors. The most bizarre fact is that there is so much that has been successfully done and so much that we can successfully do more of. We know how to save lives, so why don't we?

Building a national memorial means more than marking the individual grief of relatives and the suffering of the victims. It would be a statement of our collective desire to halt the epidemic that has plagued our streets and let our humanity take us down a quieter road.