Transport Safety is Key
Australians, like everyone across the planet, must undertake travel or otherwise enjoy unfettered mobility to satisfy the needs of our daily lives; to earn a living, visit family and friends, for recreation, and to sustain ourselves and our loved ones. Governments around the world share the singular imperative to provide access to mobility that is as safe as possible. But, how can we do this?
The broad road safety profession, which includes governments, academia, engineering consultancies, professional associations, and advocacy groups has become paradoxically reliant on precise information about fatalities and injuries on our transport networks to evaluate and understand the overall safety of road users. The paradox and ethical dilemma of this reliance is that when a fatality or serious injury occurs in our transport systems, it is already too late.
The medical profession started tackling this similar ethical dilemma years ago by shifting focus from intervention to prevention, resulting in great benefits to general health and wellbeing. Because of this shift, we’ve seen significant breakthroughs in preventing cancer, heart disease, and diabetes as examples. For instance, smoking cessation programs have shown to be effective in reducing the prevalence of lung cancer.
Historical Crash data Reliance
Until recently, the road safety profession has had good reasons to rely on crashes as the best and primary sources of information for identifying system deficiencies and justifying improvements; crashes are definitive evidence of system failures, are accurately recorded especially when severe, and methods around their use are now reasonably sophisticated thanks to decades of research. It is my direct and compelling experience that governments work tirelessly to use the tools the ‘profession’ gave them to reduce and eliminate fatalities and injuries on our transport networks. I’m afraid, however, that until now the profession has offered a sledgehammer to solve the road safety problem when a more specialised and precise set of tools is required.
The broad road safety profession, which includes governments, academia, engineering consultancies, professional associations, and advocacy groups has become paradoxically reliant on precise information about fatalities and injuries on our transport networks to evaluate and understand the overall safety of road users. The paradox and ethical dilemma of this reliance is that when a fatality or serious injury occurs in our transport systems, it is already too late.
The medical profession started tackling this similar ethical dilemma years ago by shifting focus from intervention to prevention, resulting in great benefits to general health and wellbeing. Because of this shift, we’ve seen significant breakthroughs in preventing cancer, heart disease, and diabetes as examples. For instance, smoking cessation programs have shown to be effective in reducing the prevalence of lung cancer.
The Solution: Road Safety Technology
Fortunately, through a combination of sensing technologies (like video and LiDAR), artificial intelligence, sophisticated statistical algorithms, and cloud and edge computing, we are offering an alternative to the sledgehammer. It is now time for our profession to embrace new technology, to re-think and abandon our reliance on crashes to save lives, and recognize the logical trap and outright harm this reliance is causing. We need to transition from reactive methods to proactive ones. That road crashes are the leading cause of death in most countries for people under the age of 30 is just one symptom of our reactive approach. That fatalities have stagnated in many countries is yet another. Now is the right time for change.
Luckily, the new technological solutions will leap the profession forward, will help prevent fatalities and injury reactivity, and move us out of this paradoxical trap. Proactive methods available to us now include network-wide, expert-opinion-driven safety assessments such as the internationally successful iRAP program, and emerging and highly quantitative video analytics solutions that enable us to proactively manage safety, implement real-time operations and safety, and measure operational outcomes such as critical conflicts and near-misses at high-risk network locations.
Critical conflicts are crash pre-cursors and can proactively identify risk at intersections, roundabouts, weaving areas, work zones, and more. Our most vulnerable road users in school zones and on shared-use paths must also be allowed to benefit from these technologies, particularly with the growth we are witnessing in the newly emerging road users on motorized scooters, skateboards, and electric bikes.
Public and Private Sectors to take the lead with Road Safety
Relying on crashes as our predominant source of information to improve transport network safety is reactive and ethically problematic. Whilst this crash reliance and associated methodological improvements helped us tremendously to improve global road safety from the 70s until recently, it is time to follow our wise colleagues in medicine. As all paradigm shifts go, it will not be easy. Governments need to lead the way. Public and private sector champions need to drive the change we now need for broad, public benefit. Technology needs to be harnessed to deliver proactive solutions with excellence and precision.
Proactive methods need to improve with investment and focus to deliver an increasing impact on safety. We’ll need supportive policies, early adopters seeking better ways of doing things, continued research and development, and widespread sharing of the growing number of successes.
Shifting Road Safety Towards Prevention
There is no “silver bullet” in road safety; keeping transport systems safe, always, is a very challenging task and requires a multitude of strategies. As we ponder the significance of road safety and what we are all trying to achieve, we need to ask ourselves some difficult questions. And I ask one question of all of us—to which AMAG has already decidedly answered “YES”: Do we need to shift away from intervention towards prevention to deliver safer transport systems for all road users?
