Speaker
Description
Road violence is a global issue, with its devastating impacts felt at the individual, community and national levels. Around the world, road crashes claim over 1.3 million lives annually, causing injuries to millions more with widespread social disruption and massive public health costs. There is a marked inequity in the prevalence of road violence across modes, cohorts and places, disproportionately affecting low and middle income countries as well as children and people walking or riding, especially among old people, a demographic increasing in many parts of the world where populations are stabilising or falling.
Recognising the massive impact of road violence, policymakers around the globe have moved towards the Safe System approach, a holistic strategy aimed at designing transport systems to anticipate and accommodate human error, ensuring that car crashes do not result in severe injury or death. This approach challenges more traditional road safety strategies where some degree of death and injury is seen as an acceptable price to pay for the benefit of car-based mobility. Importantly, the Safe System approach places the emphasis on making the transport system safe for people using it, rather than on how people can use the system more safely.
While the Safe System approach represents a much-needed paradigm shift, it continues to grapple with a number of inherent contradictions, weaknesses and limitations. The varying success rates of Safe System approaches across regions and over time highlight how these challenges manifest differently depending on local contexts and implementation strategies. For instance, while some countries have achieved significant reductions in road trauma over the past two decades, others, like Australia, are confronting growing challenges. In 2023, Australia experienced its deadliest year on the roads since 2016, with First Nations people, young and older individuals and pedestrians disproportionately affected. Despite this, the equity dimension of road safety including within the Safe System approach remains underexplored.
The approach is further hindered by its limited attention to feedback loops and context misfits, which often result in an inability to address the deeply entrenched social, cultural, economic, political and environmental forces that perpetuate the root cause of road trauma: car dependence. These ingrained forces create a self-reinforcing feedback loop that undermines efforts to effectively reduce road trauma. For example, the framing of Safe System approaches often narrows its focus to reducing harm within a car-dependent framework, implicitly endorsing the principle that ‘any amount of vehicle driving is acceptable as long as no one is killed or severely injured.’ This reveals a lack of genuine systems thinking, despite the use of the word "system" in its title. As a result, the systemic issues that drive car dependence remain unchallenged, undermining the potential for transformative change, including the achievement of a safe, healthy, sustainable and equitable transport system.
By providing a comparative examination of the language and methodologies used within the domains of shared responsibility, safer users and safer vehicles, the paper identifies key differences and similarities within the Safe System approach where it has been implemented and explores their implications for its success. Central to this discussion is the consideration of equity, which is vital for ensuring that road safety interventions are attentive to the existing inequalities and their underlying causes across different modes, cohorts and places.
Through a proposal of actionable strategies to improve the Safe System approach, this paper argues that embedding equity into both its methodologies and language is crucial for improving its effectiveness, not only in achieving Vision Zero but also in creating healthier, more equitable and environmentally sustainable transport systems and communities.
| Keywords | road safety; road violence; equity; safe system; vision zero |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
