A change from a system of road-safety delivery rooted in opinion, intuition, and folklore to one that is founded in science and based on factual knowledge is underway. Change, as always, faces obstacles. The main obstacle is the near absence of professionals who can be the carriers and providers of factual road-safety knowledge. The second important obstacle is the weakness of the knowledge in which these professionals would have to be trained. Both obstacles stem from the same source; in a society in which it is acceptable to deliver road safety on the basis of opinion, intuition, and folklore, there is little demand for factual knowledge and for carriers thereof. Therefore, the most urgently needed change of road-safety culture is to make intuition-based road-safety delivery socially unacceptable. Much of the present content of this paper is based on an earlier paper (Hauer 2005).
Abstract