category: literaturenote citekey: johnstonbeyondbestpracticeroad2010 title: Beyond “best practice” road safety thinking and systems management – A case for culture change research authors: "Johnston, Ian" year: 2010 date: 2010-00-00 2010 doi: 10.1016/j.ssci.2009.12.003 publication: Safety Science url: "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2009.12.003" zotero_key: PR9F7VPX zotero_storage: KNXMMH43 collections: transpordi_planeerimine folder: 001_artiklid/Road Safety Indicators firstAuthor: "Johnston, Ian"

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Safety Science

Beyond ''best practice" road safety thinking and systems management – A case for culture change research

Ian Johnston *

Monash University Accident Research Centre, Monash University, Victoria, Australia

article info

Article history: Received 1 September 2009 Received in revised form 26 November 2009 Accepted 12 December 2009

Keywords: Road use culture Institutional behaviour Safe system model Road safety best practice Road safety management system

abstract

Forecasts of an ''explosion" in the level of road trauma as many of the world's most populous nations rapidly motorise have contributed to the urgency of documenting best practice thinking and management systems to improve road safety performance. By examining the success stories of nations with either the lowest fatailty rates per head of population or with the largest recent improvements a number of ''lessons" have emerged. Data-driven problem identification and the development of evidence-driven countermeasure packages formalised in a strategy for effective implementation, with ambitious, quantitative targets and transparent lines of institutional accountability are the critical success factors. Basing this planning upon the cornerstones of the safe system conceptual model constitutes best practice thinking. This paper argues that critical elements of the safe system model are in discord with behavioural mores in the cultures of many western motorised nations and that this hampers the adoption of the most effective safety programs within key institutions and within political systems. A case is made for a systematic examination of car use and safety cultures in order to add a further dimension to best practice learnings. -2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Most westernmotorised nations have made substantial advances in reducing death and serious injury from road crashes over the last few decades. In some, but by no means in all, the gains have been in the absolute number of fatalities, not just in fatality rates, with substantial international variation in the degree of progress. Table 1 illustrates the performance gulf between Australia and the United States of America over the last decade or so. It is an update of data the author has previously published (FHWA, 2006).

Performance variations of this kind, a rising sense of urgency resulting from a decade-long period of little progress in most nations (FlA Foundation, 2006) and the implications of the rapid motorisation occurring in some of the most heavily populated nations in the world (WHO, 2004) appear to have driven an interest in identifying and documenting best practice. Several recent attempts have been made (WHO, 2004; FHWA, 2006; Koornstra et al., 2002; Wegman et al., 2006; OECD, 2002, 2008).

2. Which are the best practice road safety management nations?

The European research focussed initially on the ''SUN" countries – Sweden, United Kingdom and the Netherlands (Koornstra et al., 2002; Wegman et al., 2006) – which, consistently over more than a decade now, have recorded the lowest population-based traffic crash fatality rates among motorised countries.While this is an eminently sensible starting point, the lowest rate does not necessarily imply the existence of best practice road safety thinking and management. Trinca et al. (1988), and more recently Johnston (2006), examined the difficulties with international comparisons, even among western motorised nations, highlighting the importance of relative level of motorisation, nation size, topography, road user mix and the nature of the prevailing land transport system. Within Australia, for example, the Australian Capital Territory has a markedly lower rate than the SUN countries (http://www.infrastruc ture.gov.au/roads/safety/road\_fatality\_statistics) but it is small, almost entirely urban, has a higher income level than other States (leading to amore modern vehicle fleet) and has a very high standard road system. These structural factors strongly influence the expected safety performance within that jurisdiction.

The SUN countries have similar motorisation rates (between 540 and 580 vehicles per 1000 population in 2007) and these rates are at the low end of the scale among western motorised nations (Australia and New Zealand have rates over 700 and the USA rate is over 800). Higher motorisation results in higher exposure to risk for most classes of road user and this must partially explain the international differences in rates which, as Table 2 shows, have existed for a long time.

In one sense it does not matter whether the lowest rates truly reflect the existence of best practice. The initial SUNflower study

^* Tel.: +61 419 350 930. E-mail address: irj111@bigpond.net.au.

Table 1 The absolute number of deaths and the population-based death rates from traffic crashes in the United States of America and Australia. Source: www.infrastruc ture.gov.au/roads/safety/road\_fatality\_statistics.

	Number of deaths	Death rate per 100,000 population
United States of America
1995	41,798	15.9
2007	41,059	13.6
Percentage improvement	1.8%	14.5%
Australia
1995	2013	11.2
2007	1603	7.6
Percentage improvement	20.3%	32.1%

Table 2 Road crash fatality rate improvements over time for four European and four ''new world" nations. Source: www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/road\_fatality\_ statistics.

| | | Road crash fatality rates per 100,000 population | | | |-------------------|------|--------------------------------------------------|-------------------------|--| | | 1995 | 2007 | % Improvement (rounded) | | | European nations | | | | | | France | 15.3 | 7.5 | 51% | | | Great Britain | 6.4 | 5.0 | 22% | | | Netherlands | 8.6 | 4.3 | 50% | | | Sweden | 6.5 | 5.2 | 20% | | | New world nations | | | | | | Australia | 11.2 | 7.6 | 32% | | | Canada | 11.4 | 9.1 | 20% | | | New Zealand | 15.9 | 10.0 | 37% | | | USA | 15.9 | 13.6 | 15% | |

examined the interventions applied and the evidence of effectiveness, together with operational issues in application and conceptual methods of approach (Koornstra et al., 2002). Seeking lessons from the safest nations is an excellent starting point.

A supplementary method for identifying potential best practice nations is to identify those with the greatest gains in safety over the last decade or so, the assumption being that these nations have introduced new, effective management systems. Table 2 compares four European nations (including the three SUN countries) and four ''New World" nations. The Netherlands and France stand out among European nations as dramatic improvers along with New Zealand and Australia among the ''new world" nations. Of course, as Wegman et al. (2006) point out, the greatest rates of improvement are more likely to be found in those nations with a poorer starting point. Nevertheless, useful road safety management lessons can be found in the experience of the rapid improvers.

3. Scope and purpose

This paper explores the lessons from the ''best practice" research and considers their implications in the context of (assumed) prevailing car use and safety cultures, seeking to promote systematic future research to fill an important current void. It is confined to western, motorised nations where the bulk of the relevant research has been done. It should be noted that little scientific work on safety culture in road use has been conducted (Wiegmann and von Thaden, 2007) so the descriptions of extant culture are speculative.

4. The broad culture around road safety

In most western motorised nations from the mid 1950s through the early 1970s road safety strategic thinking and planning was the province of government-appointed coalitions (''councils") of concerned citizens; police forces; and road and traffic, particularly traffic, engineers. Crashes tended to be viewed simplistically as having one primary cause, blameworthy human behaviour, and the countermeasures were reactive, small-scale, isolated, directed largely at symptoms and with a clear tendency to be punitive.

Gradually road crashes became the subject of scientific study. Ironically however, the early in-depth, crash research, while profoundly influencing the thinking of the researchers, appears to have helped perpetuate the simplistic view of the public and the bureaucratic and political decision makers and a generation of road and traffic engineers. The public catchcry was – and still is – that 95% of crashes were caused by error or misbehaviour, which is, of course, the principal finding of these pioneering studies. Not surprisingly in an open loop system where the human is, in effect, the only active element, it was indeed rare to investigate scientifically a crash in which no operator behaviours could be found among the multiple causal elements identified. However, the importance of the interactions between road, traffic and vehicle features and particular types of behaviour never featured in public discussion of the research and rarely appeared in briefings to policymakers. Further, the concept of latent conditions within the road transport system rendering certain types of error more likely had not found its way from the study of industrial safety (Reason, 1997).

Coupled with a widespread ''blame the victim" mindset within communities was a relative apathy towards the extent of death and serious injury on the road. Williams and Haworth (2007) offer three explanations: the constant ''drip feed" of daily events ensures the ''road toll" becomes an accepted part of the road transport landscape; the accurate perception that the (personal) risk of a casualty crash on any given trip is remote; and the belief in one's personal ability to control risk, the problem being ''the other driver". While personal safety is valued, community safety is not (Johnston, 2004).

This historical perspective is important to understanding the social context in which attempts to advance strategic thinking have had to struggle with widespread, accepted views that if poor behaviour is the principal cause behaviour change must be the primary answer (Howard and Sweatman, 2007). The prevailing community culture around road safety needs to be explicitly addressed. Rose (1992) wrote a superb book over fifteen years ago outlining the strategy of preventive medicine and while road safety was not his primary focus it featured in his illustrative case studies. His thesis – that a relatively low level of individual risk spread relatively uniformly across an entire population requires populationwide measures to achieve an effect at the community level – is a perfect prescription for most road safety problems yet it is still uncommon as a strategy for behaviour change among road users.

5. The transport setting and its cultural influence

Road safety has traditionally been an issue for the transport system to address and there was, for a long time, no systematic engagement with either the field of public health or the field of occupational health and safety. Ironically, the World Health Organisation is now playing a lead role in promoting global action as road trauma assumes a more prominent position in the global burden of disease, yet it lacks the networks meaningfully to influence institutional change among the transport players (WHO, 2004, 2009). Watkins has argued that, in emerging nations, governments ''... measure the success of their roads policies in kilometres of asphalt and the speed at which goods can be carried" and that ''road safety is the poor cousin of road building" (Watkins, in Ward 2009).

The efficient movement of people and freight is the over-arching goal of road transport with the level of death, injury and property damage being one of a number of by-products to be managed. This conception of death and injury as an undesirable but necessary by-product of road transport appears to have dominated thinking in most motorised nations in the early days of rapid motorisation, still dominates in some (notably the USA), and is a common characteristic of emerging nations (Sleet et al., 2007).

Rarely were safety targets set and when they were it was in terms of the rate of death and serious injury (typically death alone) per unit of road use. As road use continues to grow, nations have continuously to improve their road and transport systems to cope with the need for more capacity and the need to minimise delay. Efficiency-inspired improvements in vehicles, roads and traffic management systems contribute to an ongoing improvement in safety per unit road use, over and above the effect of any specific safety measures; for example converting a two lane road to a four lane divided road to meet capacity demands dramatically improves safety by eliminating the risk of head-on crashes. However, if the safety gains do not outweigh the growth in road use then the absolute number of deaths must increase. That has been the case in the USA (FHWA, 2006 and Table 1) where the absolute number of citizens being killed has not meaningfully decreased.

Public policy around road transport in the USA appears to accept that a commensurate price must be paid for what is, by a considerable margin in terms of vehicles per head of population, the highest level of personal mobility in the motorised world. Judgements of priority among competing goals are, of course, the daily business of governments on behalf of their communities. The US public policy around road transport where unfettered personal mobility appears the primary goal implies the absence of a widespread, public constituency for safety (Kissinger, 2007).

Most western motorised nations have moved from using, as their main performance measure, deaths per unit road use to deaths per head of population; the common public health measure of the burden of disease, in this case the disease of mobility. The move appears to have had two drivers – the need for a measure that facilitated direct comparison with other public health issues and a desire to break from the mindset that assumes that a price for personal mobility in death and serious injury is inevitable. The USA remains one of the few nations to rely on deaths per unit road use (100 million miles driven) as its principal safety performance measure.

Elvik (2003) has shown that what matters most in creating commitment and action is the setting of ambitious, quantitative targets. The nations considered as being at the leading edge of safety thinking and performance set their safety performance targets in terms of reductions in the absolute number of deaths and serious injuries, not merely as reductions in population-based rates. This forces a shift in the institutional mindset from one of managing a by-product to one of viewing safety as a fundamental outcome of a sustainable road transport system.

Many nations continue to rely heavily upon economic analyses of cost and benefit when choosing not only whether to introduce a particular safety measure but the optimum level of resource to be allocated. A monetary value is placed on travel time (particularly congestion and delay), on environmental impacts (fuel usage, emissions, noise) and on safety (death and injury) as a method for making economically rational trade-off decisions between mobility, safety and environmental impacts among competing road and traffic investment proposals.

No distortion is introduced if the choices to be made are between competing safety projects – or congestion ameliorating projects – as such decisions are about best safety – or congestion reduction – value for money but complex socio-political issues arise when the decisions involve trading safety for mobility. Sweden is the only nation to date to have explicitly excluded the use of monetary values for death and serious injury from benefit-cost analyses of the impact of investment options. Its Vision Zero philosophy requires that there be no increase in adverse safety outcomes from any proposal (Tingvall, 2004).

Debates around the measurement of the so-called externalities within the road transport system, and what to include and exclude, are conducted within academe and the institutional players. No evidence of a public debate has been uncovered, yet if the societal culture around road safety is to become an important target for change then the debate needs to enter new arenas. The recent attempts by Wegman et al. (2008) to develop macro measures of a nation's road safety progress have begun this journey.

6. Best practice strategic thinking is not aligned with prevailing culture

The term safe system has come to represent the current consensus of what constitutes best practice strategic thinking in road safety (OECD, 2008). It builds upon the Swedish evolution of road safety strategies from their Vision Zero and the dutch development of the principles of sustainable safety. Its key elements, drawn largely from Wegman and Aarts (2006), are:

- The vision is to prevent crashes and, if this is not possible, to reduce crash severity to a point where (severe) injury risk is eliminated (since the human body has limited tolerance to kinetic energy impacts system design should be such as to keep the anticipated crash forces below human tolerance limits).
- All members of the population are road users, the full range of human abilities and personalities exist within the population, humans are fallible operators and mistakes must be anticipated as commonplace in the open-loop road transport system. (Vehicles, roads and traffic systems must be designed and operated to be error-tolerant, particularly through increased predictability in system operation, and the performance levels of users must be raised).
- Latent errors in what is an inherently dangerous traffic system must be reduced.
- All of the elements in the road safety system are interrelated and responsibility for safety must be shared across all players and efforts must be coordinated.

It is sometimes claimed, incorrectly, that adopting a safe system model transfers responsibility from the individual road user to the vehicle, road, and traffic system designers. In reality, it shares the responsibility in a way not previously achieved. The safe system seeks error-tolerance, it does not demand designs which seek to eliminate deliberate misbehaviour. The individual road user is expected to comply with prescribed (and proscribed) behaviours – to be well-trained and licensed, to be fit to take part in traffic (unaffected by alcohol, other drugs or fatigue) and to comply with the operational traffic rules such as speed limits and movement priorities throughout his journey.

The adoption of this conceptual model requires a level of change in institutional mindset that cannot be understated. While there are standards – and warrants for their use – that take safety explicitly into account their origins are rarely based on a sound understanding of human behaviour and their application is based typically on traffic volumes. Hauer (1990), for example, described the origin of the method for computing sight distance in geometric road design, a standard intended to assure adequate braking distance when an unexpected object appeared on the road ahead. The standard had to be regularly modified to increase the size of the design object as vehicle design changes regularly resulted in substantial lowering of driver eye height. The alternative of rebuilding large lengths of road was not acceptable. Lie and Tingv all (2009) have opened debate on the development of an ISO standard for traffic safety as part of a process of driving the implementation of safe system thinking through the ranks of system designers and operators.

Many discussions of the safe system model commence with a discussion of an assumed underlying ethical platform in which human life is sacrosanct. The Swedish parliament formally adopted ''Vision Zero" in 1997 which, in effect, made the prevention of death and serious injury the over-arching policy objective in the management of the road transport system (Tingvall, 1998; Tingvall and Haworth, 1999). It has been argued that this formal public adoption of policy was fundamental in paving the way for the radical change in institutional mindsets necessary.

While this may have been so in Sweden the question remains as to whether it is a necessary first step in all nations. While the ultimate objective is a system in which no-one behaving reasonably is killed or seriously injured in road traffic the socio-political realities prevailing in most countries are more likely to result in incremental steps along a safer system continuum rather than in short-term radical reform. The keys to starting the safe system journey appear to be securing top level political commitment, the setting of ambitious safety targets and the adoption of a new design and operational philosophy by the key institutions (Johnston, 2003).

The acceptance of a safer (as opposed to a safe) system mindset may appear to run the risk of leading us back into the mire of trade-off decision making, explicitly balancing the various goals of road transport against each other. But, this is not necessarily so. In many nations, utilisation of the principles of the safe system in road safety strategy formulation and the application of a formal road safety management system will be a simpler socio-political task and, providing the targets set are ambitious and, ideally, in terms of absolute reductions in serious casualties, will lead to substantial gains. Current Australian road safety planning reflects this pragmatic approach; the communications focus with the politicians and with the professionals in the critical institutions revolves around the need for error-tolerance and for kinetic energy reduction. Through this focus, strategic planning for future road safety has taken a new shape (Western Australian Road Safety Council, 2008).

7. How far has safe system thinking, planning and action permeated institutions and society?

There are three issues to consider – the extent to which the safe system model underpins a nation's strategic planning for improving road safety; the degree to which the affected institutions have adopted the operational implications of the safe system; and the level of political and community understanding and acceptance of the consequences of safe system adoption. It is not possible to examine these issues comparatively across national borders so this section is confined to observations about Australia with which the author is most familiar.

In Australia one needs to examine planning at the state level because Australia is a federation. While there is a national road safety strategy it is more a consensus document than a model. The current national strategy (2001–2010) contains no mention of the safe system (Australian Transport Council 2002). The most recent national Action Plan, however, does refer to the safe system, specifically the need to ''... include and apply safe system principles in infrastructure documents, safety audit processes and professional development programs..." (Australian Transport Council 2009).

The State of Western Australia has recently issued its strategy for the period 2008–2020. It is explicitly anchored in safe system principles and its target is a reduction in the absolute number of deaths and serious injuries. It is an excellent example of best practice strategic planning. It recognises that the State is not homogeneous but comprises a large metropolis and vast regional and remote areas, each requiring specific plans. It identifies the major problems in each; examines potential countermeasures for each major problem and evaluates the evidence of their effectiveness; models packages of evidence-based measures applied at different resource levels and selects a preferred package that optimises potential effectiveness in the context of resource opportunity and institutional readiness (Western Australian Road Safety Council, 2008). This approach is now being followed in the development of the new national strategy (Corben, 2009, personal communication).

However, understanding and acceptance of the safe system principles seems not to be widespread among institutions such as road and traffic authorities, transport planning agencies or enforcement agencies. Using speed moderation as an example – because it is so fundamental to future progress (Lie and Tingvall, 2009) – road and traffic engineers seem generally not to accept the value of reducing speed limits, particularly urban speed limits. Little of the discussion around speed limit setting examines the speed distribution as a whole. Urban speed limits remain high in Australia, in comparison with most European nations. However, in terms of infrastructure design, there are promising signs of institutional progress, for example a national roundtable was held in March 2009 to share knowledge and experience in seeking to implement safe system innovations (Turner et al., 2009).

Police officers are another group of players who seem not to accept the population-wide, preventive medicine approach to enforcement. Using speed moderation again as an example, there is little acceptance of the case for reducing enforcement tolerances when enforcing speed limits. The majority of traffic infringements issued through speed camera detection are for speeding less than 10 km/h over the limit; almost none of those issued by police officers are for less than 15 km/h over the limit. The author's personal experience in presenting in-house training to large numbers of police officers in Victoria, Australia and in New Zealand demonstrates that the vast majority of front-line officers and their immediate supervisors do not understand the importance of shifting the speed distribution to the left. They remain convinced that their principal task is to apprehend those speeding at very high levels.

While in-house training can, and should, be used to increase the understanding of officers around the critical importance of shifting the speed distribution to the left, a more immediate process is available. Assigning line officers the target of changing the speed distribution on nominated high-risk sections of the network in their patch and holding them accountable for achieving this outcome will alter enforcement practice. It is rare at present for police to set targets for other than hours of speed enforcement or number of tickets issued, both of which sidestep the objective of shifting the speed distribution rather than just impacting the tail of the distribution. Changing the speed distribution operationalises the safe system kinetic energy management principle in a realistic way for police officers.

It is clear that the spread of safe system thinking in key institutions is still embryonic in Australia. How critical and how urgent is its widespread transfer in changing institutional behaviour? It is extremely important in the longer term and will likely require the targeting of future generations of practitioners as an integral part of the curriculum for their qualifications training. In the short term, however, the key to changing institutional behaviour is the creation of appropriate targets, sound strategies, effective performance monitoring and clear lines of accountability; in short the adoption of an effective road safety management system.

There have been significant changes in institutional behaviour with regard to institutional co-operation and coordination, which captures that element of the safe system model related to the interconnectedness of all elements in the road transport system. The traditional silo approach in which each institution did its own thing independently is disappearing. The synergies across the efforts of agencies are not only reasonably well understood but in many states are being overtly and explicitly managed. In Victoria, the chief executives of the road and traffic agency, the judicial agency, the police and the compensation insurer are jointly accountable to parliament for achieving the state's road safety targets (FHWA, 2006). Again, it is the setting of targets, the clear strategies and the effectiveness of the lines of accountability that have proven crucial in driving institutional cooperation and coordination.

8. Seeking culture change

Road safety progress in the last decade appears to have stemmed from an increased emphasis on strategic planning – comprising the data-driven selection of the major problems to address, the setting of objective but ambitious targets and a focus on effective implementation of programs of measures through institutional co-operation and coordination (OECD, 2008). Nevertheless, as Wegman et al. (2006) argue, the culturally-anchored unsafe behaviours of drink-driving and speeding continue to prove barriers to the achievement of sustainable safety. It is worth noting here that the success stories of Australia (FHWA) and France (FlA Founda tion, 2006) stemmed primarily from massive investments in road policing – both equipment and enforcement intensity – to reduce the incidence of these unsafe behaviour by extreme levels of deterrence. It is an open question as to whether the underlying culture around these behaviours has changed fundamentally as a result.

It is not possible to generalise across national boundaries and arguably of dubious validity to do so across even state boundaries in a federation like Australia. Within Australia, however, it seems clear that there is little understanding within the media or the public-at-large of the safe system principles. The media reporting of new state road safety strategies has focussed on the targets and on specific measures, particularly those that involve changes to regulation and enforcement intensity.

How important is it that the public understand the thinking behind the strategies? It likely matters only when public support is needed for strategy implementation. In the early 2000s in the State of Victoria, the lowering of general urban speed limits, the intensification of speed limit enforcement, the reduction of enforcement tolerances, and the use of automated enforcement such as fixed and mobile speed cameras generated considerable public controversy. Accusations of revenue-raising dominated the newspapers and radio airwaves for many months. One political party in the lead up to an election promised to reduce the number of speed cameras and to restore enforcement tolerances, based on their interpretation of public sentiment. Interestingly, official surveys of public opinion reported a majority of citizens in favour of intense speed enforcement but this was not apparent in political reaction or media coverage (FHWA, 2006).

There is an underdeveloped constituency for safety within the Australian public. For example, both government and corporate fleet managers have resisted specifying, in their purchase specifications, vehicle safety features that are not required by regulation. Thus proven collision avoidance innovations such as electronic stability control and proven injury reduction features such as curtain side airbags are not specified. Employees have not pressed their employers to provide safety above the regulated minimum, despite duty of care provisions in occupational health and safety laws that could be brought into play.

The situation appears more acute in the United States. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has lamented that ''... one of our greatest challenges (isn't) a specific safety issue, but rather a way of thinking about all of the issues, or our ''safety culture". There are several compendia in the literature detailing known effective safety measures and providing the evidence for each (Elvik et al., 2009) but the challenge is choosing measures that the community and hence the political and institutional players will accept.

It is important to establish acceptance by both politicians and the public of the rationale for the road safety strategy to be implemented. Where folk lore and official strategy are at odds – as is the case with speed moderation across the entire speed distribution – public understanding is vital (Johnston, 2004). There can be no clearer example of a mismatch between strategic thinking and cultural mindset.

There is a total lack of action by governments worldwide and by the automobile industry to limit the power, top-speed and acceleration capability of cars and trucks. Injury reduction is a matter of limiting the (potential) transfer of kinetic energy to the human body to a level which can be borne. Industry has certainly made great progress in reducing energy transfer through seat belts, air bags, collapsible steering columns, improved side door strength and so on across a long list of crashworthiness measures but impact speeds are frequently above human tolerance levels. The principal determinant of the amount of kinetic energy to be managed in the event of a crash is impact speed and speed control has never been on the vehicle design or regulatory agenda. There is not one vehicle safety design rule that pertains to top-speed capability or acceleration performance. Moreover, the speedometer through which the driver manages his speed of travel contains a scale that displays speeds of double or more that permitted on all but a handful of the world's roads. A manufacturer can get a five star safety rating for a model that can exceed 250 km/h!

The automobile industry markets and sells on power and performance far more so than on any other feature; there is a vibrant global motor sports industry that links manufacturers (if tenuously in reality) to publicly available brands; there is a thriving aftermarket in speed-related accessories; and motoring journalists tend to promote speed and performance in their reviews of new models. The fact that governments have not intervened illustrates the global economic importance of the industry in all its forms as well as an apparent belief that the community (the market) does not believe that speed limiting is important at the vehicle design level.

A wider issue is the relative roles of public versus political acceptance in the adoption of safe system principles and, more importantly, in their effective implementation. The chicken and egg argument of whether the politicians develop public policy that reflects public opinion or whether public policy is used to shape public opinion is often heard when safety is discussed.

It is at least arguable that the politicians in most Australian states have not accepted the safe system as such but have merely accepted the package of measures that comprise the particular strategy put to them, after weeding out any specific measures deemed unacceptable politically. The new strategy adopted by the government in Western Australia, for example, excluded the recommended reductions in speed limits because of their perceived unpopularity (Western Australian Road Safety Council, 2008). None of this is surprising, or even disappointing; it is simply part and parcel of the functioning of a democracy. What matters is that the politicians accept a strategy that contains challenging targets of reductions in the absolute numbers of serious casualties, a package of evidence-based measures that are likely to achieve those targets and transparent mechanisms for public accountability for achieving those targets. This requires leadership, especially for those critical measures in the package that may prove controversial. The safety strategists have a crucial role in providing politicians with an understanding of the evidence underpinning the strategy and its package of measures.

The safe system model requires shared responsibility. Road users must comply with the prescribed and proscribed behaviours and norms of road use while system designers and operators must provide a system that is error-tolerant and manages potential kinetic energy for a compliant road user population. How well are we managing compliance with appropriate behavioural norms? The cornerstones are requiring self-protection behaviours, such as seat belt wearing; controlling entry to the road system (for other than pedestrians and bicyclists) by licensing; promoting fitness to drive through the prescription of blood alcohol and similar limits; and prescribing a set of road rules governing precedence at conflict points and maximum permitted speeds under various circumstances.

It is with regard to behavioural norms that differences in cultural underpinnings across nations assume paramount importance. The author was requested to prepare, for the US Department of Transportation, an account of how Victoria achieved a halving of road crash fatalities in a 15 year period (FHWA, 2006). Victoria's success stemmed largely from a preparedness to legislate, regulate and enforce, supported by extensive public education specifically to underpin these measures. In France, the dramatic improvements noted in Table 2 followed the adoption at the end of 2002 of ''a comprehensive plan to automate the ''control and sanction" chain for driving offences and particularly for speeding offences" (FlA Foundation, 2006). The USA has been unable, given its cultural norms, to sustain basic self protection legislation requiring helmets or seat belts to be worn. Only 21 states require all vehicle occupants to wear seat belts, one state has no belt wearing law at all. A large number of states do not require motorcyclists to wear helmets. Random breath testing, a proven effective measure, is not acceptable. Thus, the United States is severely handicapped in terms of its strategies for road user behaviour compliance under the shared responsibility principle. The need for individual nations to develop tailored approaches to culture change to reflect their unique patterns is crucial.

What we have not done, at least not systematically, is address the cultural mores that underpin behaviour. Earlier, the conflicts surrounding the speeding issue were discussed as a prime example. A population-wide speed behaviour change (a general slowing down) in the interest of the common good is hardly likely without significant cultural change. Individuals perceive a personal benefit from setting their own travel speed, do not regard low level speeding as dangerous and seem not to accept that if everyone moderated their speed by a small margin there would be significant safety gains for the community.

The Dutch have started examining the theoretical principles underpinning what they call 'social forgivingness" to begin to understand how to formulate a strategy for changing the prevailing cultural more of personal gain to one of community gain in dictating road user behaviour (Houtenbos, 2009). The concept is a general one of how we might engender a culture around road safety that would facilitate a preventive medicine approach to behaviour change (Rose, 1992). Howard and Sweatman (2007) use the term ''social contract" to describe the bringing together of prevailing community views and strategic thinking around road safety. Future road safety gains demand increased scientific attention to the issues around changing the culture of road safety.

Urban geographers concerned with social cohesion and community well-being (May et al., 2008) have issued a call for a shift towards an ethic of care, a call which to date appears to have escaped the attention of mainstream road safety professionals. Cooperative research between public health, urban geography, environmental sustainability and road safety professionals may well be a promising way forward in developing a culture change research agenda.

9. Conclusions

Having an appropriate strategy and action plan is one thing, achieving implementation is quite another. There are several excellent road safety management systems in the literature (for example Bliss and Breen, 2009) but they cannot be implemented effectively without a political and community willingness to tread down a safe (or even a safer) system path. The recent OECD report on achieving ambitious road safety targets (OECD, 2008) stresses the importance of political commitment and public support before going on to list the detailed requirements for institutions and governments, requirements which are necessary but not sufficient.

The keys to current best practice can be summed up in the four Cs:

- Constituency – unless the public demands action, appropriate resource will not be applied. In Victoria, for example, each of the new programs introduced in 1970, in the period around the mid 1970s, in the mid 1980s and in the early 2000s followed public ''outrage" at apparent, dramatic increases in death totals (FHWA, 2006). However, ''outrage" generates only an immediate response. A constituency based upon a cultural underpinning of an ethic of care for community is likely to be required for sustained progress.
- Commitment – without political will from the top, success must be limited. The outstanding demonstration is in France which went from laggard to best practice within three years after the President personally intervened (FlA Foundation, 2006). Commitment and constituency are bedfellows, with political leaders tending to move with publicly held behavioural norms.
- Cooperation – road safety is institutionally very complex with the actions of numerous agencies impacting upon progress. Without meaningful cooperation integrated packages of measures cannot be successfully applied (FHWA, 2006; Wegman et al., 2008).
- Coordination – the necessary bedfellow of cooperation, coordination is vital to integration and synergy across institutional efforts (FHWA, 2006; Wegman et al., 2008).

It is instructive that the latest work out of Europe on how to measure road safety progress recommends three indices – one based upon policy performance (e.g. the quality of the strategic and operational planning and the political will); one based upon implementation performance (e.g. process indicators like resource applied); and one based on more conventional safety outcome measures (e.g. deaths and injuries) with the three linked causally in a chain from policy to outcome (Wegman et al., 2008).

Ideal best practice is when the principles of the safe system have been adopted within all of the institutions impacting the design and operation of the road transport system and applied through an effective management system with transparent lines of institutional accountability for the achievement of tough targets for reductions in death and serious injury. Institutional acceptance is related to community understanding and acceptance.

We must systematically address several critical socio-cultural issues around car use and road safety and explore ways of moving towards community acceptance of a duty of care. It may well be that a duty of care in road use can best be developed through public engagement in sustainability. This will require political leadership, duty of care role-modelling by governments and large companies, and the creation of partnerships with others concerned with the sustainability of urban society. A community constituency needs to be created and the beginning likely lies in vigorous and well-informed public debate (Howard and Sweatman, 2007). The ethic of care (conservation) created in nations like Australia around water and waste needs extending to road transport.

As Wiegmann and von Thaden (2007) conclude: ''While the concept of safety culture has been fundamentally applied to organisations or groups, it has yet to be systematically applied to the population at large". Given the discord between some of the key behavioural norms of road use and the principles of safe system thinking addressing the research void is likely to make a significant progress to ongoing safety gains.

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