4.2 Safety and the Current Transport System

The Safe System approach is a comprehensive safety philosophy, developed and internationally agreed upon to form the foundation for safe design and operation of the road transport system. The deficiencies in traditional approaches to achieving a safe road network were highlighted by Tingvall (2005). He noted that the road transport system is traditionally characterised as follows:

• An open system with a large number of stakeholders loosely connected to each other.
• Societies not having a clear and shared idea of how the system should develop in safety terms, with individual countermeasures implemented on an ad hoc basis in isolation from each other.
• Components not operating in alignment, with large parts of the system not tolerating speeds higher than 50 or 60 km/h, road users allowed to drive at 100 km/h, and modern vehicles having the capacity to travel readily at 200 km/h. This substantial mismatch is a key factor explaining current inadequate safety levels.
• Lack of acceptance of responsibility by stakeholders. While individual users have a clear legal responsibility, other important providers/operators of the system often do not.
• The legal and moral blame in crashes is placed most often on the road user.
• Measures to prevent crashes and injuries have had the individual user as the main target. To do so with a high-energy system where large gaps exist between human capability and the requirements necessary to travel safely within the system, is an indicator of a lack of acceptance of responsibility from the providers of the system.
• There has not been adequate guidance developed for the system providers and operators to do what is necessary.
• There has not been an agreed definition of what a safe road transport system is, only what is safer.

These comments draw attention to the fact that there has been a lack of acceptance of responsibility in this field by most governments. The safest communities (ITF, 2016) will be those that embrace the shift towards a Safe System and begin work now on the interventions required to close the gap between current performance and the performance associated with a genuinely safe road traffic system.

This requires an understanding not only of the current system’s safety weaknesses, but also of what change may be possible in the short-term to achieve Safe System compliant outputs. Sufficient management leadership within government road safety agencies (including road authorities), as outlined in Chapter 3. The Road Safety Management System , is essential to achieve meaningful progress in the delivery of these substantially different outputs.