Abstract
The theory of risk homeostasis has been put forward as a tentative explanation for a jurisdiction's traffic accident rate per km, per hour of road- user exposure, and per capita, as well as their pattern of interrelations. According to this theory, the accident rate per time unit of exposure is the end product of a homeostatic control process in which the level of risk accepted by the road user population functions as the regulating variable. Although the real- life data lending support to this theory are many and varied, there is a lack of controlled experimental verification.