Road Safety Management

Diagram & Summary

The high cost of motorized mobility to society and public health

The quality of daily road travel touches the lives of almost all European citizens either as road crash victims or their family, friends and colleagues. In the European Union, road crashes comprise 97% of all transport crash deaths; more than 93% of all transport crash costs and are the leading cause of death and hospital admission for people younger than 50 years. Within the EU, international comparison of death rates in road traffic indicate a substantial variation in road safety performance. The socio-economic cost is estimated to be about 2% of EU countries’ gross domestic product - around Euro 180 billion and twice the EU’s annual budget [22]. A high price is currently being paid for motorized mobility in human and economic terms.

Road traffic injury is largely preventable

Early road safety policies over-emphasised the role of individual responsibility for road crashes which prevented relevant authorities from fully embracing their responsibilities. In the 1980s, increasingly successful strategies recognised the need for a systems approach. The focus of strategy shifted towards improvement of the infrastructure, vehicle safety and user compliance with key safety measures. Evidence-based interventions were targeted systematically at crash prevention, reducing injury severity and post crash care. New delivery mechanisms were adopted such as automated police enforcement; fiscal incentives; technical guidelines; better crash and injury information systems and databases; and independent crash investigation and research. By the early 1990s, and with political support, many countries used road safety action plans with numerical targets and broad packages of measures. Their experience confirmed that growing motorization did not inevitably lead to increases in death rates but could be reversed by year on year planned investment in improving the quality of the traffic system. The United Kingdom, for example, halved its death rate (per 100,000 population) despite a doubling in licensed motorized vehicles between 1972 and 1999.

In the late 1990s, this systems approach was refined further in Europe and achieved new rationality in the Swedish Vision Zero and Dutch Sustainable Safety strategies which sought to build in traffic system safety to prevent user failure from creating unacceptable harm, a practice common in other transport modes and in most sectors of the economy. The blame the victim ' culture gave way to 'blaming the traffic system. Speed management and human limitations – both behavioural and physical - became core issues for the design and operation of the road traffic system. In parallel, policies in Australia and New Zealand achieved new heights in results management, delivery partnerships and multi-sectoral co-ordination demonstrating that individual responsibility of all stakeholders could be enhanced by emphasizing their responsibilities, competences and accountabilities.

The elements of effective road safety management

International organizations such as the World Health Organization [45], the World Bank [5] the OECD [44] and the ECMT [16] all acknowledge that the key to achieving better performance in road safety is by more effective road safety management. There is a need to address systematically the main risk factors and adopting proven measures more widely with appropriate resource by a combination of:

• System implement evidence-based measures which take greater -wide approaches using long term visions, system-wide strategies, targeted plans and performance indicators to account of human limitations;
• Sharing responsibility for implementation and finding new opportunities for increased road safety activity through co-ordination with many sectors and synergies with environmental and public health policies and using new delivery mechanisms to complement existing tools.