Safe System Approach Research Articles

Embedding the Safe System approach at schools in Qatar

Providing safe roads around schools is a challenge faced by all communities. Children’s behaviour is unpredictable and their safety is of particular concern in an area where there is often a mix of vulnerable road users and motor vehicles. In 2011, Ashghal commissioned a major road safety contract to conduct road safety assessments at 200 schools throughout Qatar. The results have since been collated into a comprehensive school safety improvements program and Ashghal is now constructing safe and convenient school zones for all road users throughout Qatar, based on the principles of a Safe System. The Qatar National Road Safety Strategy (2013-2022) has a vision of “a safe road transport system that protects all road users from death and serious injury” and adopts the Safe System as the guiding principle for building safe roads. The Safe System acknowledges that people make mistakes and that there is a limit to human injury tolerance. For example, a pedestrian hit at 30km/h is likely to survive (OECD, 2008). Whereas, a pedestrian hit at 60km/h is likely to be killed. Schools in Qatar are being treated with standard traffic engineering measures in a way that aims to achieve a Safe System 30km/h environment. Schools that have been completed show tremendous success and the benefits are being directly felt by parents, teachers, children and key stakeholders. Survey results show that vehicle speeds within school zones are successfully lowered to Safe System limits and that these speed reductions are being achieved over a 24 hour period without the need for Police enforcement. The improvements carried out to date have been well received and are seen as a positive step towards Qatar’s ambitious road safety vision. Site observations and speed surveys undertaken to date support the proposition of developing Safe System schools in Qatar.

Addressing the pandemic on our roads

Reviewing the progress made in UN's Decade of Action on Road Safety 2011-20, it is clear that much remains to be done. The problem of road safety is reaching pandemic proportions; there are 1.3 million traffic related deaths annually, 50 million are disabled because of injuries from road traffic accidents every year, people road accidents are the 8th leading cause of non-natural death, road accidents are the leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds, 60% of all traffic deaths are among 15-44 year olds, traffic accidents result in a loss equal to 1-2% of national GNP. As road infrastructure expands and becomes better in many parts of the world, and motorisation rates increase, the need to act to address this pandemic on our roads is becoming ever more urgent. In this presentation I will outline a strategy for countries to address the pandemic of death and injury from road accidents. This strategy is based on: • The UN's five pillars – Road safety management, safer roads and mobility, vehicles, road users, and post-crash response, • The safe system approach, • Building political commitment and stakeholder support for improving safety, • Performance management, • Evidence, and • Providing value for money

The relative contribution of system failures and extreme behaviour in South Australian crashes

Within the road system, there are compliant road users who may make an error that leads to a crash, resulting in a ‘system failure’, and there are also road users who deliberately take risks and display dangerous or ‘extreme’ behaviours that lead to a crash. Crashes resulting from system failures can be addressed through improvements to road system design more readily than crashes resulting from extreme behaviours. The classification of crash causation in terms of system failures or extreme behaviour is important for determining the extent to which a Safe System approach (i.e. improvements to road system design to serve compliant road users) is capable of reducing the number of crashes. This study examined the relative contribution of system failures and extreme behaviour in South Australian crashes as identified from information in Coroner’s investigation files and in-depth crash investigations conducted by the Centre for Automotive Safety Research (CASR). The analysis of 189 fatal crashes, 272 non-fatal metropolitan injury crashes and 181 non-fatal rural crashes indicated that very few non-fatal crashes (3% metropolitan, 9% rural) involved extreme behaviour by road users and, even in fatal crashes, the majority (54%) were the result of system failures. Fatal crashes resulting from system failures were more likely than those resulting from extreme behaviour to occur during the day, on weekdays, in rural areas and on roads with high speed limits. Findings from the current study suggest that improvements to the road transport system (i.e. forgiving road infrastructure, appropriate speed limits, and safe vehicle design) can be expected to be much more effective in reducing crashes than concentrating on preventing extreme behaviours. Such a strategy could reduce the incidence and severity of a large proportion of crashes in South Australia.

Safe system approach to reducing serious injury risk in motorcyclist collisions with fixed hazards

Collisions with fixed objects in the roadway environment account for a substantial proportion of motorcyclist fatalities. Many studies have identified individual roadway environment and/or motorcyclist characteristics that are associated with the severity of the injury outcome, including the presence of roadside barriers, helmet use, alcohol use and speeding. However, no studies have reported the cumulative benefit of such characteristics on motorcycling safety. The safe system approach recognises that the system must work as a whole to reduce the net injury risk to road users to an acceptable level, including the four system cornerstone areas of roadways, speeds, vehicles and people. The aim of the present paper is to consider these cornerstone areas concomitantly, and quantitatively assess the serious injury risk of motorcyclists in fixed object collisions using this holistic approach. A total of 1006 Australian and 15,727 (weighted) United States motorcyclist-fixed object collisions were collected retrospectively, and the serious injury risks associated with roadside barriers, helmet use, alcohol use and speeding were assessed both individually and concomitantly. The results indicate that if safety efforts are made in each of the safe system cornerstone areas, the combined effect is to substantially reduce the serious injury risk of fixed hazards to motorcyclists. The holistic approach is shown to reduce the serious injury risk considerably more than each of the safety efforts considered individually. These results promote the use of a safe system approach to motorcycling safety.

Growing burden and impact of road crashes in India: need for a safe systems approach

As per estimates, nearly 175,000 (136,900 as per official reports) persons died due to road crashes in India in 2011 along with hospitalisations and disabilities among survivors. More than 70–80% of these deaths and injuries occurred among young people, men and among pedestrians, two wheeler riders and pillions, and cyclists. The economic loss due to road crashes is an estimated $550 billion (INR 55,000 crores) or 3% of GDP (at 2004 prices) every year. Road safety in India requires a scientific approach for making road users safer in all traffic environments considering the limitations of human behaviour. There is need for strong road safety policies and programmes, a lead agency to coordinate activities, capacity strengthening, human resources, dedicated funding, strong advocacy, implementing scientific interventions, along with monitoring and evaluation. The 4‘E’s of Engineering, Enforcement, Education and Emergency Care need to be addressed through an intersectoral approach. In India, road deaths and other injuries are publicly glaring, while road safety is professionally lacking and politically missing and needs to be corrected for making road environments safer through multipronged approaches.

Assessing the ‘system’ in safe systems-based road designs: Using cognitive work analysis to evaluate intersection designs

While a safe systems approach has long been acknowledged as the underlying philosophy of contemporary road safety strategies, systemic applications are sparse. This article argues that systems-based methods from the discipline of Ergonomics have a key role to play in road transport design and evaluation. To demonstrate, the Cognitive Work Analysis framework was used to evaluate two road designs – a traditional Melbourne intersection and a cut-through design for future intersections based on road safety safe systems principles. The results demonstrate that, although the cut-through intersection appears different in layout from the traditional intersection, system constraints are not markedly different. Furthermore, the analyses demonstrated that redistribution of constraints in the cut-through intersection resulted in emergent behaviour, which was not anticipated and could prove problematic. Further, based on the lack of understanding of emergent behaviour, similar design induced problems are apparent across both intersections. Specifically, incompatibilities between infrastructure, vehicles and different road users were not dealt with by the proposed design changes. The importance of applying systems methods in the design and evaluation of road transport systems is discussed.

CYCLING SAFETY: KEY MESSAGES OF THE INTERNATIONAL TRANSPORT FORUM OF THE OECD'S WORKING GROUP ON CYCLE SAFETY

BackgroundBicycles are an essential part of the urban mobility mix worldwide, and it is important to consider cycling safety to a greater extent than has hitherto been the case.Aims/Objectives/PurposeThe aim...

Towards sustainable pedestrian safety: the Bangladesh context

BackgroundRoad traffic injuries in Bangladesh have now emerged as a serious development challenge and are inhibiting poverty reduction strategies. A major portion of the people killed or seriously injured in...

Highway Geometric Design from the Perspective of Recent Safety Developments

In a safe-system approach to road safety, problems are dealt with by considering how several components of the road transportation system interact rather than implementing countermeasures in isolation. In this paper, the authors propose that relevant information from the fields of the safe-system approach, including user-centered design and road safety auditing, be integrated into highway geometric design guidelines. A framework is proposed for integrating safety and human factor issues into highway geometric design guidelines. Key issues to be addressed include safety training of highway design engineers, three-dimensional highway design and implementation of a safe system. The safe system approach has already been applied in several states and countries, and has the potential to be implemented in other places.

How to make more cycling good for road safety?

This paper discusses the current level of the road safety problems of cycling and cyclists, why cyclists run relatively high risks, and why cyclists may be considered as ‘vulnerable road users’. This paper is based on peer-reviewed research which give some idea how to reduce the number of cyclist casualties. However, this research is rather limited and the results cannot (easily) be transferred from one setting or country to another: generalization of results should only be done with the utmost care, if it is to be done at all. Interventions to reduce cyclist casualties worldwide seem to be of an incidental nature; that is to say, they are implemented in a rather isolated way. In a Safe System approach, such as the Dutch Sustainable Safety vision, the inherent risks of traffic are dealt with in a systematic, proactive way. We illustrate how this approach is especially effective for vulnerable road users, such as cyclists. Finally, the paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to make more cycling good for road safety. We conclude that when the number of cyclists increases, the number of fatalities may increase, but will not necessarily do so, and the outcome is dependent on specific conditions. There is strong evidence that well-designed bicycle facilities—physically separated networks—reduce risks for cyclists, and therefore have an impact on the net safety result, for example if car-kilometres are substituted by bicycle kilometres. Policies to support cycling should incorporate these findings in order to make more cycling good for road safety.

Managing hazards in the workplace using organisational safety management systems: a safe place, safe person, safe systems approach

Not all hazards in the workplace manifest in the same way. Some are obvious because their impacts are direct and easily felt, such as physical workplace hazards; others are indirect because the effects are long term or further downstream from the original work process; and some are hazards because their absence, for example the lack of safe systems of work, makes the workplace less safe. A framework to manage workplace hazards in small to medium enterprises was derived from a review of the literature and the application of the Deming ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act' cycle. A collection of 57 elements separated into three main areas – safe place, safe person and safe systems, were used to analyse 10 international and Australian occupational health and safety management system (OHS MS) structures with a view to understand emergent trends, appreciate which elements were the most popular and highlight particular strengths of individual structures or assessment tools analysed. Further application of this framework to assist small to medium enterprises is suggested as is the potential to develop a hierarchy of controls specifically dealing with managerial hazards.

USING THE SAFE SYSTEM APPROACH TO KEEP OLDER DRIVERS SAFELY MOBILE

In 2003, Australian road transport jurisdictions collectively accepted that the greatest road safety gains would be achieved through adopting a Safe System approach, derived from Sweden's Vision Zero and the Netherlands' Sustainable Safety strategies. A key objective of all three approaches is to manage vehicles, the road infrastructure, speeds, road users and the interactions between these components, to ensure that in the event of crashes, crash energies will remain at levels that minimize the probability of death and serious injury. Older drivers pose a particular challenge to the Safe System approach, given particularly their greater physical frailty, their driving patterns and for some at least, their reduced fitness to drive. This paper has analyzed the so-called ‘older driver problem’ and identified a number of key factors underpinning their crash levels, for which countermeasures can be identified and implemented within a Safe System framework. The recommended countermeasures consist of: (1) safer roads, through a series of design improvements particularly governing urban intersections; (2) safer vehicles, through both the promotion of crashworthiness as a critical consideration when purchasing a vehicle and the wide use of developed and developing ITS technologies; (3) safer speeds especially at intersections; and (4) safer road users, through both improved assessment procedures to identify the minority of older drivers with reduced fitness to drive and educational efforts to encourage safer driving habits particularly but not only through self-regulation.