Skip to main content

IRF appoints new global road safety champion

The International Road Federation has a new spearhead for its global road safety programme. Michael Dreznes will serve as the Federation's (IRF) executive vice president with worldwide leadership on training, policy and capacity-building activities.
March 2, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
The 713 International Road Federation has a new spearhead for its global road safety programme. Michael Dreznes will serve as the Federation’s (IRF) executive vice president with worldwide leadership on training, policy and capacity-building activities.

"Mike has spent the last twenty-six years working to make roads safer around the world," said Patrick Sankey, president and chief executive of IRF in Washington DC, the United States, where Dreznes will be based. "He is recognised as one of the world's leading experts on roadside safety, pioneering the concept of Forgiving Highways, and we are thrilled to have him lead the road safety initiatives of IRF."

Sankey said one of Dreznes’s key areas of responsibility will be to work with road authorities around the world to use IRF's Safer Roads by Design executive road safety training.

Speaking about his new role Dreznes said: "IRF is where I can truly make a difference. Too many countries around the world are using obsolete roadside safety measures and technologies that should have been replaced twenty years ago.

"I will collaborate with road authorities, concessionaires, design consulting engineers, academia and other safety stakeholders to encourage the replacement of outdated technology and to introduce state-of-the-art practices in countries around the world, thereby assisting governments with their commitment to the 3262 United Nations Decade of Action to reduce fatalities by 50% by 2020," Dreznes said.

The co-chairman of the 2774 Transportation Research Board Roadside Safety Design Subcommittee on International Research Activities, Dreznes is also a member of the TRB AFB20 Committee on Roadside Safety Design.

Founded in 1948, the IRF is a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization with members from both the public and private sectors in 90 countries worldwide.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • GRAA winner profile: urban cooling and active transportation in Los Angeles
    July 19, 2022
    The Urban Cooling + First/Last Mile Strategies in Los Angeles-Canoga Park Project explores resilient streetscape solutions that mitigate two critical planning issues impacting LA: extreme heat (“Urban Cooling”) and limited safe active transportation access (“First/Last Mile”).
  • Martin Weissburg is new Volvo Construction Equipment president
    November 19, 2013
    Martin Weissburg has been appointed new president of Volvo Construction Equipment. The 51-year-old is currently president of the Volvo Group’s customer finance company, Volvo Financial Services (VFS), and a member of the Group executive team. He will assume his new position on January 1, 2014, replacing Pat Olney. Weissburg has been the President of VFS since 2010, and prior to that served as president of Volvo Financial Services Americas from 2005 to 2010. Within his position at VFS, Weissburg has worked
  • Current technologies could eliminate 90 per cent of traffic accidents
    April 27, 2012
    Nearly every traffic accident caused by driver error – up to 90 per cent of all crashes – could be eliminated if existing intelligent transportation technologies were implemented in vehicles and on roads, say experts at IEEE, the world's largest technical professional association. These include electronics and computing technologies such as in-vehicle machine vision and sensors to detect drowsy drivers, lane departure warning systems, and vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications for s
  • IRF releases 60th edition World Road Statistics
    November 6, 2023
    The International Road Federation (IRF) has just unveiled the 60th Edition of the IRF World Road Statistics (WRS), the most complete and latest road and transport data.