Safe System (also known as Vision Zero in Sweden or Sustainable Safety in the Netherlands) has been ground-breaking in its strong ethical standpoint about zero tolerance to the road deaths and serious injuries in traffic. Rather than accepting severe road collisions as the inevitable price to be paid for transport efficiency, Safe System sees them as preventable events, given the system designers have provided a sufficient amount of protection layers. The Safe System approach focuses on a professional traffic and transport system design that prevents road death and serious injury, while allowing for some inevitable human error and human failure.
Safe System is nowadays acknowledged as the state-of-the-art within road traffic safety. However, on the practical implementation level (and, unfortunately, quite often within the research community) there are many erroneous interpretations and internal conflicts between the traditional way of doing things and the operational methods prescribed by the Safe System.
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The recommended reading includes:
- Edvardsson Björnberg, K., S. O. Hansson, M.-Å. Belin, C. Tingvall (eds.) (2023), The Vision Zero handbook: theory, technology and management for a zero casualty policy. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76505-7
- Trafikverket (n.d.) ‘Vision Zero Academy’. The Swedish Transport Administration. https://bransch.trafikverket.se/en/startpage/operations/Operations-road/vision-zero-academy
- ITF (2024) ‘Road safety in action: the safe system tool’. https://safesystemtool.itf-oecd.org/en/
- ITF (2022) ‘The Safe System approach in action’. International Transport Forum. https://www.itf-oecd.org/safe-system-in-action
- ITF (2016) ‘Zero road deaths and serious injuries: leading a paradigm shift to a Safe System’. International Transport Forum. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789282108055-en
- Larsson, P., C. Tingvall (2013) ‘The Safe System approach—a road safety strategy based on human factors principles’ in Harris, D. (Ed.) Engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39354-9_3
- Johansson, R. (2009) ‘Vision Zero—implementing a policy for traffic safety’. Safety Science 47, 826–831. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2008.10.023
- ITF (2008) ‘Towards zero: ambitious road safety targets and the Safe System approach’. International Transport Forum. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789282101964-en