David Hembrow and Marc Wagenbuur have a great final piece on why Sustainable Safety should be the goal of road safety campaigners in the UK and I’d recommend everyone read it.

Marc then goes on to explain the Dutch approach to road design, known as Sustainable Safety, doing a much better job than I tried to do back in September.

The main objectives of this vision are preventing severe crashes and (almost) eliminating severe injuries when crashes do occur. It was introduced and quickly adopted by all road managers in 1992 and has since been very successful. In 2005 it was revised and extended. The approach began with establishing that the road system was inherently unsafe. The goal was to fundamentally change the system by taking a person as a yardstick. The physical vulnerability of a person, but also what a person can and wants to do (humans make mistakes and don’t always follow rules) were to be guidelines for design. There is now an integral approach to the road system which refers to ‘human’ (behaviour), ‘vehicle’ (including bicycles!) and ‘road’ (design). Roads and vehicles must be adapted to the human capabilities and the human has to be educated enough to be able to operate a vehicle on a road in a safe manner. The approach is pro-active, it wants to remedy gaps and mistakes in the traffic system before crashes occur. So Sustainable Safety is about a lot more than just infrastructure.

Find out more at http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/campaign-for-sustainable-safety-not.html