Improving traffic safety culture in the United States : the journey forward. Safety culture: What is it? How can we measure it? What can we do to change it?

Many officials from the traffic safety community believe that to achieve substantial reductions in motor vehicle crash related casualties, our own way of thinking presents both one of our most formidable barriers and one of our most promising opportunities. In October 2005, the AAA Foundation hosted a workshop, cosponsored by the Federal Highway Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to identify and prioritize long-range traffic safety research needs. A recurring theme throughout the workshop was that one of our greatest challenges wasn’t a specific traffic safety issue, but rather our way of thinking about all of the issues, or our “safety culture.” Following the workshop, the AAA Foundation made “Safety Culture” one of our four priority areas for sustained research and educational efforts. The overarching goal of this program is to ignite and sustain a serious dialogue about and demand for traffic safety at all levels of our society, elevating traffic safety on the national agenda to a place commensurate with its public health impact. Recognizing that we would not be able to make a paradigm shift happen by ourselves, we began by soliciting input from the community regarding what “safety culture” is, how it can be defined or measured, and most importantly, how it can be improved. During February, March, and April 2006, we actively sought input from the traffic safety community and others, in the form of brief concept papers describing directions for the AAA Foundation and/or the community at large to take to promote change. Authors of several of these concept papers received in response to that solicitation were invited to develop their thoughts further, resulting in the papers in this compendium. All of the papers in this compendium focus on the general theme of “culture” in the context of motor vehicle traffic safety. As you will see, there is considerable variation in the scope and focus of individual papers, as well as the perspective from which they were written. (Author/publisher) The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has also released an executive summary of this report that is a compendium of papers designed to expand the discussion and debate over traffic safety. The papers in the compendium address the “traffic safety culture” from a variety of perspectives. This summary can be accessed at: http://www.aaafoundation.org/pdf/SafetyCultureSummaryAndSynthesis.pdf For papers presented in this volume, see C 42628 - C 42649.