FHWA Safe System Approach

Reports, announcements, statistics from NHTSA, NTSB, FHWA, IIHS, and others related to Highway Safety
MSI
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FHWA Safe System Approach

Post by MSI »

Federal Highway (FHWA) report by Mark Doctor and Chimai Ngo
Which begins:
  • Achieving the vision of eliminating deaths and serious injuries from the Nation’s roads may seem daunting with traffic fatalities in the United States stubbornly remaining between 32,000 and 39,000 annually for more than a decade. To make meaningful progress, changes are needed in how to think about the traffic safety problem and the approaches to solve the problem. The Safe System Approach is being applied with great success in a growing number of nations and cities around the world and has now taken hold in the United States.

    The Safe System Approach has origins in Sweden through its Vision Zero program and with the Sustainable Safety program in the Netherlands. These early adopters experienced impressive decreases in road traffic fatalities—each with at least a 50-percent reduction in fatalities between 1994 and 2015. The concept has spread to other countries in Europe and beyond with notable success in Australia and New Zealand.

    The Safe System Approach considers five elements of a safe transportation system—safe road users, safe vehicles, safe speeds, safe roads, and post-crash care—in an integrated and holistic manner
    • Safe Road Users—The safety of all road users is equitably addressed, including those who walk, bike, drive, ride transit, or travel by other modes.
    • Safe Vehicles—Vehicles are designed and regulated to minimize the frequency and severity of collisions using safety measures that incorporate the latest technology.
    • Safe Speeds—Humans are less likely to survive high-speed crashes. Reducing speeds can accommodate human-injury tolerances in three ways: reducing impact forces, providing additional time for drivers to stop, and improving visibility.
    • Safe Roads—Designing transportation infrastructure to accommodate human mistakes and injury tolerances can greatly reduce the severity of crashes that do occur. Examples include physically separating people traveling at different speeds, providing dedicated times for different users to move through a space, and alerting users to hazards and other road users.
    • Post-Crash Care—People who are injured in collisions rely on emergency first responders to quickly locate and stabilize their injuries and transport them to medical facilities. Post-crash care also includes forensic analysis at the crash site, traffic incident management, and other activities.
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