Road safety as a human right in Guadalajara: Legislative progress, institutional challenges, and prospects for reducing deaths.

This article analyzes road safety in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area from a perspective that integrates normative, institutional, and territorial dimensions. Using a mixed-methods approach, it examines the gap between recent legislative progress and the persistence of high levels of road mortality. The study identifies several key factors: the insufficiency of fiscal mechanisms in the state law, institutional fragmentation, operational disparities among municipalities, and the rapid growth of motorcycles as a work tool. Overall, the findings show that road traffic injuries and deaths in the metropolitan area cannot be explained solely by implementation failures, but rather by an urban and governmental system that distributes risk unevenly. The analysis highlights that closing this gap requires stable funding, institutional strengthening, and territorial policies aimed at protecting the most vulnerable road users.