The present article aims at investigating politicians and decision makers perception of challenges related to safety in transport and to examine priority of safety in public decision making. A sample of 21 principal decision makers in Norwegian transport politics was selected and semi-structured interviews were carried out. They were related to all the four main types of transportation (road, railway, aviation and sea fare). The results showed that the single factor mentioned most frequently by the participants to solve the challenges related to safety in transport were building new public roads and improving the infrastructure. Organisational change and reorganisation of public administration were also judged to be important countermeasures. Individual-level safety measures, like attitude campaigns and driver training, were given low priority compared to the majority of other countermeasures. For successful decision making consensus was perceived to be more important than polarisation of opinions and conflicts. (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see E216632.
Samenvatting