It is now widely recognized that road safety management should be organized on a multisectoral basis, involving a large number of actors, both from the public and the private sectors. However, putting this principle into practice implies deep organizational changes which are not easy to implement. A major problem is the degree of involvement of key actors and the integration of road safety priorities and activities in their current workload. The paper discusses this issue with regards to Health, Security, Urban Planning, and Road and Transport Policies. Road safety management problems are not simply solved by creating national coordinating institutions and developing intersectoral decision-making processes and action programmes: implementing road safety interventions within an intersectoral approach involves altering the priorities in most of the sectors taking part in the action, developing new ways of thinking and new attitudes, creating new professions, generalizing training, reorganizing carrier development, changing decision-making patterns and structures, and taking the responsibility for road injury prevention seriously enough to attack difficult operational problems. It is not surprising, therefore, that road safety policies develop slowly. Any decision taken on road safety programmes or measures has to take into account the whole implementation process it will generate in order to allocate adequate resources and take steps to alleviate foreseeable difficulties. Awareness of how actors work in each sector is thus needed to develop realistic action programmes, ensure full effectiveness of road safety measures and help in bringing about the institutional, social and psychological changes that will increase road safety performances. For the covering abstract see ITRD E138952. This paper is available from http://www.ictct.org/workshops/06-Minsk/Muhlrad.pdf.
Abstract