The competing and conflicting aims of individual mobility, environment koelauto and safety will continue for the foreseeable future. Advancing technologies will offer an increasing array of possible solutions but, as in the past, the application of new technologies will be controlled by the acceptance of social change and financial consequences. In urban environments particularly, limiting car access and segregating the several classes of road user will continue to be one of the major political and technological challenges. The case will be argued for the safety dimension to be considered explicitly and numerically in the planning of future urban and rural transport planning decisions. Too often in the past strategic decisions about modal choice, land use and road network design have been made on mobility and efficiency grounds, and then the risk and safety consequences have been considered as only a second order event. The recognition of traffic accidents and injuries as a continuing major social and financial loss is likely to move up the political agenda in highly motorised countries, but will lag behind in those countries where vehicle ownership is still following a linear growth path. Numerical target setting by governments for casualty reductions with explicit strategies for highway design, traffic management, behavioural change, exposure control, injury mitigation and casualty management will lead to a more scientific approach, and will likely emphasize the effectiveness of technological solutions over the more traditional emphasis on behavioural change measures. The main part of this paper will examine some of the technologies likely to develop which will deliver significant reductions in the incidence and consequences of traffic collisions. In the areas of highway design and traffic management, reductions in conflicts and segregation in time and space will continue to be prime considerations, but speed and headway control by electronic means will be applied only as rapidly as social adoption will allow. In the accident avoidance area the most effective technologies are likely to address alcohol use by in-vehicle sensing, and fatigue sensing by monitoring eye and eyelid movements. Advances in lighting, brakes and traction control will deliver incremental benefits, but the fundamental limitation to vehicle control of the tyre/road interface is likely to remain the over-riding factor. The greatest advances are likely to come in the secondary safety area, with major improvements in crashworthiness and restraint systems. Intelligent seat belts and airbags adapting their characteristics to individual sitting positions and biomechanical properties will become practical, whilst airbag technology will be applied to side, rear, rollover and pedestrian accidents. Compatibility between cars and cars and particularly between cars and large trucks remains a difficult problem, and the increasing numbers of lightweight urban cars will likely exacerbate compatibility issues. Roadside objects and off-road collisions in general will become relatively more important and the application of energy management techniques to this area will lead to much interest in barrier design, energy absorbing structures and the placement and design of off-road objects generally.
Samenvatting