Rethinking the causes of road trauma: society’s problems must share the blame
- Written by Paul Salmon, Professor of Human Factors, University of the Sunshine Coast
After years of consistent progress, reductions in the road toll are plateauing in many countries. Australia’s road fatalities increased by 7.5% in 2016, and the number of fatalities per 100,000 population rose by 6%. This trend appears to be continuing in 2017.
Road trauma is already the ninth leading cause of death worldwide. It is estimated it will be one of the top five killers by 2030.
In efforts to stem road trauma, the global road safety community has promoted what it calls “safe systems” approaches. These cover:
In Queensland, enforcement and education campaigns aim to prevent the “fatal five” behaviours known to underpin road trauma:
Assuming some drivers will still engage in these behaviours, efforts also focus on how vehicles, road environments and trauma and rehabilitation services can be modified to reduce the likelihood of death and serious injury in a crash.
This approach has achieved considerable, undeniable success. But it may have reached its limits of effectiveness.
Why isn’t this approach working any more?
Fundamentally, the current “safe systems” approach is based on reductionism: that is, the road transport system is artificially isolated from its broader environment and broken into even smaller, discrete parts (such as road users, vehicles and roads).
Attempts are then made to optimise these parts under the assumption that once they are all put back together, the system will naturally perform better.
But complex systems, which are far more than the sum of their parts, do not operate like that. Instead, modified parts interact with other parts in new ways and unexpected emergent behaviours can occur. Factors across the system might also resist change, bringing the modified parts back to their original state, or creating new issues that arise from previous solutions.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, things extrinsic to the system itself can influence the behaviour of the individual parts.
For most people, driving is simply a means to an end, and something that is affected by the pressures of life and work. There are wider societal issues driving road user behaviour that a traditional road safety approach cannot fix.
For example, take driving under the influence of illicit or prescription drugs, which is an emerging road safety problem.
Drug misuse and addiction are both societal issues that road safety authorities attempt to manage through enforcement and education campaigns. But the current road safety approach does not tackle the underlying issue of drug misuse and addiction. Rather, it simply identifies and removes drug-affected drivers from the road.
This approach is based on causal loop logic, such as that presented below. The diagram suggests a mechanism whereby drug-related crashes and fatalities lead to policy action, which then drives increased enforcement.
The diagram illustrates the belief that identifying drug-affected drivers and removing them from the road will lead to a decrease in the number of drug-affected drivers and related crashes.
But what’s important to note in this representation is that nowhere are societal problems of drug misuse and addiction tackled.
Authors: Paul Salmon, Professor of Human Factors, University of the Sunshine Coast