Portugal wants to halve road deaths by 2030. But who repaints the faded crossing on your street?

TL;DR

• Portugal has committed to halving the number of road deaths and serious injuries by 2030, under the National Road Safety Plan and the European «Vision Zero» strategy — reaching 2050 with zero road fatalities.
• According to ANSR (the National Road Safety Authority), the vast majority of pedestrian knockdowns happen within built-up areas — that is, on streets managed by the local council, not on motorways.
• Placing and maintaining road signage — vertical signs, road markings, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and speed bumps — on municipal roads is, by law, the council's responsibility. The leaning sign or the faded crossing on your street has a clear owner.
• A crossing you can no longer see, a broken traffic light or a STOP sign hidden by a branch are not aesthetic details: they are safety conditions failing at the very places where pedestrians are most concentrated — near schools, bus stops and health centres.
• The problem, more often than not, is not that the council doesn't want to fix it — it's that nobody has reported the fault to those who must correct it. That is exactly what Queixate is for: log it, directed to the right council, and track whether it gets resolved.

An ambitious target — decided on everyday streets

Portugal has made a clear commitment: halve the number of road deaths and serious injuries by 2030, on the path towards «Vision Zero» — the European goal of reaching 2050 with no road fatalities at all. This ambition underpins the National Road Safety Plan and aligns Portugal with European Union objectives.

When people think about road safety, the mind jumps straight to motorways, speeding, drink-driving. All of that matters. But a significant part of the equation is decided much closer to home — literally on the street where we live. Because, according to ANSR data, the vast majority of pedestrian knockdowns happen within built-up areas: at the junction near the school, at the crossing by the bus stop, at the roundabout outside the supermarket.

And those streets are not managed by some distant, anonymous entity. They are managed by the local council.

Who owns the sign on your street? The council

Here is the part that usually gets left out of the conversation. When a sign is missing, when a crossing has all but vanished or when a traffic light spends days flashing, most people shrug — as if it belongs to nobody, or to «the State» in the abstract. It doesn't.

On roads and streets under municipal jurisdiction, it is the council that has the authority to install, maintain and replace signage: vertical signs (STOP, give way, prohibitions, directions), road markings on the surface (pedestrian crossings, lines, arrows, parking bays), traffic lights and other devices such as speed bumps and raised crossings. The Highway Code sets out how this signage must be done; ensuring it exists, is visible and works, on the streets of the municipality, is the council's job.

This means a faded crossing is not a weather quirk. It is a maintenance service — repainting the road marking — that, on that street, is not happening. A broken traffic light is not fate: it is a repair that has not yet been made. A STOP sign obscured by tree foliage is a pruning job that was never carried out. Each has an owner — and each gets fixed when the information reaches whoever must act.

And that is where the knot lies: the fault often goes unreported. A crossing in the town centre gets flagged quickly; a crossing in an outlying neighbourhood, on the road to a primary school, can remain invisible to the system for months — faded on the ground and absent from the council's records.

A crossing you cannot see is not a detail — it is a safety issue

It is worth being clear about what is actually at stake. Street signage exists for one purpose: to manage the encounter between drivers and pedestrians at the points where that encounter is most dangerous. When it fails, it fails exactly there.

A faded crossing stops telling the driver «people cross here» and stops telling the pedestrian «you may cross here». A broken traffic light turns an orderly junction into a battle of nerves. A missing sign removes the rule from the place where it is needed most. And whoever pays first for these failures is always the most vulnerable road user: the child leaving school, the elderly person who needs more time to cross, the person with reduced mobility, the cyclist.

It is no coincidence that road safety plans place so much emphasis on pedestrian crossings and «traffic calming». Well-marked and lit crossings, speed bumps near schools, traffic lights with timings suited to pedestrians on foot — these are municipal measures, cheap when weighed against a life, and they make the difference between a fright and a tragedy. The goal of halving road deaths will not be met through national campaigns alone: it is met, street by street, with signage that works.

What you can spot — and report — on your street

You do not need to know anything about traffic engineering to notice signage that is not doing its job. Next time you walk down your street, three concrete questions:

1. Can you still see the crossing? If the ground markings have faded — especially near schools, bus stops or health centres — the council needs to schedule a repaint. A crossing you cannot see is a crossing that no longer protects anyone.
2. Is the traffic light or sign working? A traffic light that is out, broken or has been flashing for days; a sign that has fallen, is skewed, is illegible or is blocked by vegetation — all of these compromise how the road reads, and all have a fix.
3. Is the street inviting speed where people are on foot? A school zone with no traffic calming at all, a long crossing with no refuge island, a dangerous junction with no adequate signage — these are situations worth logging, because that is how the council knows where to intervene first.

None of these situations gets resolved through a frustrated post on social media that nobody forwards. It gets resolved with a report directed to whoever has the authority to act — and with the ability to track whether it was dealt with.

From bystanders to people who demand answers

The faded crossing on your street is a good test of the state of public space: it is a concrete service, with a concrete owner, that is either working or it isn't. Portugal wants to reach 2030 with half as many road deaths — and that target is won, in large part, on the ordinary streets of every municipality, where the vast majority of pedestrian knockdowns occur.

When a road marking disappears or a traffic light goes dark, you don't have to shrug. Reporting a crossing you can no longer see, a broken traffic light or a missing sign is not «making trouble»: it is giving the council the information it needs to fulfil its obligation — and leaving a trail that makes it possible to verify whether it was resolved.

If there is a dangerous crossing on your route, or on your children's route to school, report it at queixate.pt. It's anonymous, it's free and it takes less than two minutes. Someone is responsible for the safety of your street — they just need to hear about it.