Management systems for road safety

Progress in the area of prevention is formulated in an environment of beliefs, called paradigms as can be seen in the next table. Some of them can be referred to as professional folklore, i.e. a widely supported set of beliefs with no real basis. For example, the “accident-prone driver” was a belief that was supported by the data in the sense that a small number of drivers do participate in a disproportionate number of accidents, it follows that the identification and removal of this drivers will reduce crashes. A more scientific analysis of the data indicate that this phenomenon can be explained simply by the random nature of the accidents, and not for a specific error-prone attitude of such drivers.
From: OECD Road Transport Research
A prerequisite for progress in this area is to introduce national programs with clear and quantifiable objectives, some examples are:
Sweden has developed a new concept to improve road safety called "Vision Zero". Vision Zero is conceived from the ethical base that it can never be acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system. It centres around an explicit goal, and develops into a highly pragmatic and scientifically based strategy which challenges the traditional approach to road safety.
Vision Zero: strategic principles
While the concept envisages responsibility for safety amongst the designers and users of the system, the designer has the final responsibility for "fail-safe" measures.
Vision Zero: system designer has primary responsibility
Modern Road Safety makes a distinction between the situation and the management systems necessary to control it, with prevention activities that largely exceeds the self-evident fields of the traditional 3 E (Engineering, Enforcement, Education) approach, first introduced in 1925. Modern Management systems have the aims of be inclusive, i.e. to include explicitly all activities part of such system. Forming an integrated whole
The more extensive effort to obtain a comprehensive, holistic design of a road safety system, with the direct participation of 123 persons, representatives of different areas of activities, was done in Chile, (CONASET, 1993), utilizing the methodology for the design of social systems developed by Del Valle (1992). The result was the design of the control apparatus for this situation, called “Road Safety System”, defined by its components. An informal test of its completeness can be done simply by consider this management system without any of its components, for example if we remove rescue we simply lose opportunities to save human life coming from activities in this area. It can be used as an outline to assess the completeness of national road safety programs.
Please note than the following table is a systems definition i.e. it is supposed that is parts form an integrated whole.
The field of Road safety is handicapped by the terminology. Words have power to them that conveys impressions as well as meanings, phenomena that in this case results in sub-optimal approaches to prevention, as follows:
The name “Road safety” have conveyed that in this field the activities need to concentrate on items that properly belong to roads and, by extension, to the roads authorities, keeping a reduced scope of activities in a number of different areas, in spite of their potentially significant contributions. For example, in the UK, Burrough, (1991) indicates that only one-third of the target reduction will be delivered by road safety engineering measures while Koornstra ( 2002) indicates “The contribution of local road engineering to the fatality reductions between 1980 and 2000 are estimated to be 4% for Sweden, 10% for Britain, and 5% for the Netherlands”. Whereas TEC (2003), quotes a research from the Imperial College, London that indicates than the progress in medical technology and care made a significant contribution to the 45% fall of fatalities during the last 20 years, and account for 700 lives saved annually in the UK, and further puts forward that the lack of consideration of the benefits coming from the medical area, suggests that road safety is probably less effective that thought. It is remarkable that implicitly the author of the research doesn't consider medical activities as a component of a road safety management system.
It reflects confusion between the space where this phenomenon occurs (mainly roads) and the design of the Management systems to control it, in what “Roads” is only a 11% of the activities (one area out of nine in previous table).
The use of the word “accident” with its connotations of being and unavoidable event, weaken the resolve to intervene in order to reduce crashes and the resulting harm. Evans (1991) argues that the word “crash” indicates in a simple factual way what is observed, while “Accident” seems to suggest in addition a general explanation of why it occurred.
Road safety recognizes that crashes, and their consequences, are multifactor events, Ogden (1996) indicates: “An approach based in notions of cause and blame is simplistic in the extreme”. In short, crashes have factors not causes .
Old approaches emphasize the concept of problem-solving in road safety, but it is more correct to recognize that road safety activities do not solve problems. For instance, when a safer road design is implemented, hopefully the number of crashes, or their seriousness, will go down, but they will not disappear. It is more correct to say the implementation of correct policies, programs and measures will reduce numbers or consequences of crashes, but they will not be ´´solved´´.
This realization is important, because it changes the focus from a problem that will go away if we devote enough resources to it, to a situation requiring on-going management. This management in turn requires the development of scientifically based techniques, which will enable us to predict with confidence that safety resources are well-spent and likely to be effective.