Advancing sustainable safety: National road safety outlook for The Netherlands for 2005–2020

Abstract

Although road safety has improved enormously over time, and The Netherlands is one of the safest countries in the world, the current annual number of road casualties is still considered as unacceptable. To support next steps the sustainable safety vision was launched in the early 1990s. The idea was to make the Dutch road traffic system inherently safe. Sustainable safety was the guide in the approach of improving road safety in The Netherlands the last two decades. Because implemented sustainable safety measures reduced the number of casualties, the vision can be considered as successful. More than a decade later, SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research judged the time ready for evaluating and updating the original Sustainable Safety vision. The advanced sustainable safety vision is meant to inspire the road safety community and all tiers of government in the way they may improve road safety in the coming 15 to 20 years. This paper presents the (theoretical) core of the advanced sustainable safety vision: the aims of preventing crashes, and where this is not possible, to reduce the chance of severe injury to (almost) zero; the proactive approach to reach this, with ‘man as the measure of all things’ as a starting point, in a balanced combination of the elements ‘road’, ‘vehicle’, and ‘man’. In the sustainable safety vision, five principles are central now: functionality of roads, homogeneity of masses and/or speed and direction, predictability of road course and road user behaviour by a recognizable road design, forgivingness of the environment and of road users, and state awareness by the road user. The vision has been translated into numerous ideas for practical proposals. Special attention is paid to implementation of these proposals given the political and governmental context of The Netherlands.