Eliminating Serious Injury and Death from Road Transport

"The book explodes the myths that currently drive society's view of traffic safety and limit progress in reducing death and serious injury. It presents current scientific knowledge in a non-technical way and draws parallels with other areas of public safety and public health. It uses examples from the media and from public policy debates to paint a clear picture of a flawed public policy approach and offers preventive medicine principles to take the field forward"-- "Preface Both Ian Johnston and Eric Howard have spent lengthy careers in the traffic safety field attempting to translate knowledge gained from traffic safety research findings and hard-won frontline experience into policy and practice, and have long been battling to understand why traffic safety progress lags so far behind what scientific knowledge demonstrates is achievable. The motivation for this book was a desire to make sense of our experiences and frustrations and to set out our conclusions in the hope that we may catalyse a community demand for transformational change, and that we may guide and motivate the future efforts of the myriad others working in the field. Many, if not most, Western motorised nations regularly celebrate their ongoing improvements in traffic safety road crash fatality rates per million kilometres driven and per head of population are indeed at historic lows. Sadly, though, the Western focus is invariably on the incremental gains made, and not on the sum of the ongoing losses. We never acknowledge the frightening total of serious injuries and deaths from traffic crashes that we are prepared to tolerate, that we accept implicitly through the targets set in our official safety strategies. Road use is the highest-risk daily activity we engage in, and in this book we argue that collateral damage from daily road use is no longer acceptable, and that future gains must be fundamental rather than marginally incremental"--