Road safety

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

• The traffic system has to adapt to take better account of the needs, mistakes and vulnerabilities of road users.
• The level of violence that the human body can tolerate without being killed or seriously injured forms the basic parameter in the design of the road transport system.
• Vehicle speed is the most important regulating factor for a safe road traffic. It should be detemined by the technical standard of both roads and vehicle so as not to exceed the level of violence that the human body can tolerate.

Vision Zero: system designer has primary responsibility

• System designers are responsible for the design, operation and the use of the road transport system and are thereby responsible for the level of safety within the entire system.
• Road users are responsible for following the rules for using the road transport system set by the system designers.
• If the users fail to comply with these rules due to a lack of knowledge, acceptance or ability, the system designers are required to take the necessary further steps to counteract people being killed or injured.

Management systems

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.

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 his completeness can be done simply by consider this management systems without any of his 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 a outline to assess the completeness of national road safety programs.

Semantics

• Road safety

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 previus table).

• Accident

• Cause of accidents

• Problem-solving

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, witch will enable us to predict with confidence that safety resources are well-spent and likely to be effective.

References

Burrough P. Procedure for the Road Safety Audit of Truck Roads Schemes. 10p. (UK Department of Transportation, London)

CONASET 1993, Política Nacional de Seguridad de Tránsito. Comisión Nacional de Seguridad de Tránsito, Chile 1993.

Del Valle, Alfredo, 1992. Innovative planning for development: An action-oriented approach. University of Pennsylvania, 1992.

Evans, L. (1991) Older drivers risks to themselves and to other road users. Transportation Research Record 1325, 34-41. Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C.