To reduce the number of road traffic casualties to (nearly) zero, a Safe System approach is now generally regarded as best practice towards reaching such an ambitious goal. Key components that have been identified are:
- People make errors, which is accommodated by system design that supports safe road user behaviour to prevent crashes.
- As people are vulnerable, the system design is forgiving and prevents exposure to large crash forces to reduce the probability of severe injury.
- System providers share the responsibility for safe system design.
- All elements of the system are strengthened in combination to multiply their ef-fects and to ensure safety when one of the elements fails.
- Robust institutional governance is established by permanent institutions to organ-ise a safe system
A Safe System approach differs from more traditional approaches such as black spot management or crash clustering methods in that it is more proactive and draws on more general knowledge of weaknesses in the system to address these weaknesses. The start-ing point of both approaches being the reduction of human failure, the traditional ap-proach is more directed at improving the behaviour of individual road users, while the Safe System approach is much more directed at accommodating human error by an in-herently safe design that is less dependent on individual choices of road users.
Countries, cities, or organisations adopting ‘vision zero’ do not always start from the idea of a Safe System. There are several examples where the emphasis is mainly on getting support from the public and trying to educate road users how to behave safely but with-out explicitly addressing the responsibility of system providers to accommodate human error and prevent large impact forces on the human body. Although public and political support is also relevant in successfully organising the adoption and implementation of a Safe System approach, such support is generally not considered to be key element of a Safe System.
More and more countries and organisations are in the process of adopting a Safe System approach, following early adopters such as the Netherlands and Sweden. Their experi-ence started in the 1990s and demonstrated that a Safe System approach can lead to relatively large reductions in casualties, ranging from a 30% to 50% reduction in fatalities over several years.
Although there is no fixed recipe for adopting a Safe System approach in every detail, it is generally accepted that an important starting point is to set an ambitious goal and use opportunities to take steps in the right direction. Interim targets may help further in guid-ing the process.
The Safe System approach is expected to be inspirational for meeting UN global sustain-ability goals in the ambition to reduce societal harm. A Safe System approach is also ex-pected to become more important in a traffic system with more automated systems, as a discussion on what the public sees as an ‘acceptable risk’ for such services is foreseen.
