Advocates, traffic safety

We must, at all times, be conscious of the (unsurprising) tendency by advocates of specific causes to choose measures most favourable to their cause. Let us illustrate. If we examine the frequencies of all causes of deaths in Western society, we find that heart disease and cancer are the big two. However, as we have already seen, the disease of mobility is a disease of the young. Traffic safety advocates like to discuss... 

The theory of risk management as applied to injury prevention in any area of human endeavour advocates the adoption of a hierarchy of controls (Figure 5.1)." The three most effective strategies within the six-level hierarchy are elimination, substitution, and engineering controls. Applied to traffic safety, an example of risk elimination is the separation of opposing carriageways to remove the possibility of head-on crashes. An example of the substitution of a greater risk with a lesser one is the installation of roadside barrier that replaces a collision with a tree (in the event of... 

In New Zealand, the government not only required positive benefit-cost ratios before a project could proceed, but also mandated that the economic returns must reach a prescribed positive level. When this policy was introduced, safety projects became uncompetitive. The traffic safety specialists made a successful case for a switch from the direct cost method to the willingness-to-pay method for estimating the dollar value of a statistical life. The switch resulted in an approximate doubling of the value of a life and got a lot more safety projects over the line in the benefit-cost competition. Sadly, traffic safety advocates in New Zealand currently bemoan a failure to adequately adjust overtime, the values derived of this paradigm shift of well over a decade ago. ... 

In Australia, at present there are few effective traffic safety advocates. Who might facilitate the creation of a constituency, a constituency that demands a new approach It clearly will not be the government Nor can the front line come from the bulk of traffic safety professionals, as they are anployed by the government. The role of academics is moot, as most depend on funds from the government transport institutions for their research nevertheless, we must seek better links between the ivory towers and the corridors of power. 

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