Abstract
Cultural paradigms determine both how we view road safety and the actions we take to improve it. While there may be many different competing paradigms for dominance, one paradigm can be seen as dominant. The dominant paradigm has changed a number of times over the century of motorization. The Finnish scholar Valde Mikkonen (1997) has characterized conceptual development in road safety as a slow evolution punctuated by brief revolutions, which he sees as leading to a new dominant paradigm.