Road traffic safety

Road traffic safety refers to methods and measures for reducing the risk of a person using the road network for being killed or seriously injured. The users of a road include pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, their passengers, and passengers of on-road public transport, mainly buses and trams. Best-practice road safety strategies focus upon the prevention of serious injury and death crashes in spite of human fallibility (which is contrasted with the old road safety paradigm of simply reducing crashes assuming road user compliance with traffic regulations). Safe road design is now about providing a road environment which ensures vehicle speeds will be within the human tolerances for serious injury and death wherever conflict points exist.

As sustainable solutions for all classes of road have not been identified, particularly lowly trafficked rural and remote roads, a hierarchy of control should be applied, similar to best practice Occupational Safety and Health. At the highest level is sustainable prevention of serious injury and death crashes, with sustainable requiring all key result areas to be considered. At the second level is real time risk reduction, which involves providing users at severe risk with a specific warning to enable them to take mitigating action. The third level is about reducing the crash risk which involves applying the road design standards and guidelines (such as from AASHTO), improving driver behaviour and enforcement.

Traffic Safety (book)

Traffic Safety, ISBN 0-9754871-0-8, is a book authored by Leonard Evans, published in 2004 by the Science Serving Society of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Chapter headings

1. Introduction
2. Data sources
3. Overview of traffic fatalities
4. Vehicle mass and size
5. Environment, roadway, and vehicle
6. Gender, age, and alcohol effects on survival
7. Older drivers
8. Driver performance
9. Driver behavior
10. Alcohol
11. Occupant protection
12. Airbag benefits, airbag costs
13. Measures to improve traffic safety
14. How you can reduce your risk
15. The dramatic failure of US safety policy
16. Conclusions

Traffic Safety uses the methods of science to examine the deaths, injuries, and property damage from traffic crashes. It is more focused on public policy and countermeasures than the author’s 1991 book Traffic Safety and the Driver. Results derived from many disciplines, including psychology, sociology, medicine, epidemiology, criminology, biomechanics, economics, physics, and engineering are synthesized into easily understood relationships. (details at http://www.scienceservingsociety.com/traffic-safety.htm ).