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1
Introduction
B y some measures, the safety of road travel has improved greatly over the history of the
automobile. Traffic deaths per kilometer of vehicle travel were five times higher in the
United States in 1950 than today (National Safety Council 2007, 110–111; NHTSA 2010, 2).
Per capita annual deaths of pedestrians and cyclists in road crashes declined by about two-thirds
over the same period, although walking and bicycle trips per household have increased at least
since the 1970s (FHWA 1983, 1, 6; FHWA 2010). However, because of growth in traffic, the
health costs of automobile travel remain high. U.S. traffic deaths fluctuated between 40,000 and
44,000 annually from 1993 to 2007, then fell by 9.3 percent to 37,423 in 2008 and by an
additional 9.7 percent to 33,808 in 2009, the fewest since 1949 (NHTSA 2010, 1). The
exceptional percentage decline in deaths from 2007 to 2009 probably is largely a consequence of
the recession that began in 2007.1 About 262,000 persons suffered incapacitating injuries in
traffic crashes in 2008 (NHTSA 2009, Table 54). Motor vehicle crashes caused 28 percent of all
deaths among young people 1 to 24 years of age in the United States in 2006 (Heron et al. 2009,
Table 10).
The lack of progress in reducing the highway casualty toll might suggest that Americans
have resigned themselves to this burden of deaths and injuries as the inevitable consequence of
the mobility provided by the road system. In other countries, public officials responsible for the
roads have declared that this human and economic cost is neither inevitable nor acceptable and
have undertaken rigorous and innovative interventions to reduce crashes and casualties. In
Europe, Australia, and Japan, annual numbers of deaths and death rates per kilometer of vehicle
travel have declined dramatically. Nearly every high-income country is today reducing annual
traffic fatalities and fatality rates faster than is the United States, and several countries where
fatality rates per kilometer of travel were substantially higher than in the United States 15 years
ago are now below the U.S. rate.
Officials responsible for traffic safety in the countries with relatively good safety
performance attribute this progress primarily to government traffic safety programs, including
improvements in traffic control and road design, vehicle safety regulations, and willingness to
enact and enforce stringent driver regulations regarding speed, alcohol and drug use, seat belt
use, and restrictions according to driver age.
The gap between traffic safety progress in the United States and the other high-income
countries deserves the attention of U.S. transportation administrators and the public because it
indicates that the United States may be missing important opportunities to reduce traffic deaths
and injuries. The Transportation Research Board (TRB) formed the Committee for the Study of
Traffic Safety Lessons from Benchmark Nations to review the evidence on the factors that
account for other countries’ safety improvements and to recommend actions that would take
1
As Chapter 2 describes, relatively large declines in deaths and in the fatality rate occurred during past recessions;
therefore, it seems likely that the recession that began in 2007 is the major factor behind the recent trend. Traffic
deaths increased with economic recovery after past recessions, and it is too early to determine whether the recent
sharp decline represents a break from the long-term trend.
9
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10 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
advantage of the foreign experience and would fit in the U.S. context. The study committee’s
charge (defined in the task statement approved by the National Research Council) is as follows:
This study will document the experience of nations such as Sweden, United Kingdom,
Netherlands, and Australia in sharply reducing traffic deaths and injuries through safety
programs designed to alter driving behavior. The study will focus on the strategies these
nations used to build public and political support for such interventions.
The purpose of the committee’s study was to identify traffic safety strategies that could
succeed in the United States. However, comparative analyses of international traffic safety
experience also have relevance outside the United States. With increased motor vehicle use
worldwide, most dramatically in China, India, and other developing countries, traffic fatalities
and injuries have become a major and rapidly growing global public health threat. The World
Health Organization has estimated that 1.2 million deaths and 20 million serious injuries occur
annually in road traffic crashes (TRB 2006, 1–9). Therefore, recognition of the successes that
some countries have achieved should be of value internationally.
The charge calls on the committee to document the experience of other countries in
reducing road traffic casualties. In fact, the international experience has been documented
extensively in the reports on safety programs and management practices of a series of
delegations of U.S. administrators to agencies in other countries, sponsored by the Federal
Highway Administration (FHWA) and the American Association of State Highway and
Transportation Officials (AASHTO) (FHWA 2009) and in reports of the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Groups on Speed Management
(OECD and ECMT 2006a) and on Achieving Ambitious Road Safety Targets (OECD and
International Transport Forum n.d.; OECD and International Transport Forum 2008). The latter
OECD panel undertook a systematic benchmarking effort, soliciting reports from member states
on fatality trends and on laws and safety initiatives concerning speeding, drunk driving, seat belt
use, young drivers, pedestrians, and road infrastructure hazards. In 2004, TRB’s Research and
Technology Coordinating Committee commissioned a report that describes safety management
methods used abroad and compares them with methods in U.S. states with successful safety
programs (Diewald 2004). In 2006 the National Academies, with the sponsorship of the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, convened a workshop on transferring the traffic safety technology of the high-
income countries to developing nations (TRB 2006). The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety,
the Governors Highway Safety Association, and other organizations in the United States also are
examining the international experience and developing programs to emulate international best
practices. In 2009, FHWA and AASHTO began an initiative to develop a new national strategic
highway safety plan through a series of workshops and other public events. The initiative,
Toward Zero Deaths: A National Strategy on Highway Safety, reflects awareness of other
countries’ progress and methods on the part of U.S. safety administrators. (FHWA n.d.).
The past reviews (summarized in Chapter 3) concur that successful national programs
function effectively at three levels:
• Management and planning,
• Technical implementation of specific countermeasures, and
• Political support and leadership.
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Introduction 11
U.S. road and safety officials recognize the successes of other countries but face
obstacles in transferring the strategies that other countries have used. Among the obstacles are
the following:
• Decentralization: in most of the benchmark countries, regulation and enforcement are
highly centralized, often the responsibility of a single national authority, whereas in the United
States, 50 states and thousands of local jurisdictions are responsible for traffic safety and the
operation of the highway system;
• Public attitudes that oppose measures common elsewhere: for example, in the United
States, motorcycle helmet laws and speed enforcement using automated cameras often encounter
active public opposition;
• Weak support for or opposition to rigorous enforcement in legislatures and among the
judiciary, a reflection of these same public attitudes;
• The constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches, which prevents U.S. police
from conducting the frequent and routine driver sobriety testing without probable cause that is
common practice in some other countries; and
• Resource limitations that prevent enforcement of the intensity common in other
countries.
The obstacles are, to an extent, the product of differences in political systems and in the physical
characteristics of transportation systems, and possibly of other social and cultural factors.
However, a further important obstacle has been lack of technical capacities required to apply the
systematic management practices that all previous reviews have identified as critical to the
performance of the benchmark nations’ safety programs. The committee has concentrated its
attention on the obstacles to transferring successful practices of other countries to the United
States, and the recommendations in Chapter 5 include proposals for steps toward overcoming the
obstacles.
The term “benchmark nations” in this report refers to the group of high-income nations
whose traffic safety practices have been commonly compared with practices in the United States.
The past reviews concluded that governments in these countries have given high visibility and
genuinely high priority to traffic safety initiatives and that these nations have achieved low
absolute rates of traffic fatalities and steady progress in reducing rates. The countries most often
cited in the literature reviewed by the committee include Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the
Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, and the United Kingdom. These
countries are not uniform in their practices or results, and information was more readily available
for some than for others. In the descriptions of safety programs in Chapters 3 and 4, the
countries chosen for comparison with the United States vary with the topic under discussion.
In this introductory chapter, the first two sections below introduce the study topic by
summarizing statistics on traffic fatality trends in the United States and other countries and
observations from several sources, including the scanning tours of FHWA and AASHTO, on the
programs of some of the benchmark countries. The third section explains how the committee
understood and responded to its charge. The final section outlines the remainder of the report.
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12 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
TRAFFIC SAFETY PROGRESS IN THE UNITED STATES AND OTHER COUNTRIES
Fatality rates per vehicle kilometer of travel have declined greatly in the high-income countries
for at least the past 40 years (and in the United States, for as long as data have been available,
since the 1920s). For six large high-income countries, Table 1-1 shows fatalities per vehicle
kilometer in 1970 and 2008 and the percentage decline in the fatality rate during the period. In
France, Germany, and Japan, an automobile trip in 1970 was 10 times more likely to result in a
death than an average trip of the same length today. In the 1970s, the U.S. fatality rate was the
lowest in the world, but because safety has improved more slowly in the United States than
elsewhere, today most high-income countries have matched or gone below the U.S. rate. Among
17 high-income countries with annual data available for the period 1997–2008, the U.S. speed of
improvement was the poorest: a 2.4 percent reduction in the fatality rate annually compared with
6.9 percent in France, 6.4 percent in Germany, 5.5 percent in Japan, 4.3 percent in Australia, and
3.9 percent the United Kingdom (Figure 1-1).
Reducing the fatality rate has reduced total annual fatalities in most high-income
countries in the past decade. For the six countries tabulated above, Table 1-2 shows the
reduction in fatalities. While some other countries reduced deaths by nearly half in the period, in
the United States the decline was only 11 percent as a result of slow progress in reducing crash
rates. If the United States had been able to reduce fatalities per kilometer of travel by the same
percentage each year as did the United Kingdom (which achieved one of the slower average
annual reductions among the countries shown in Figure 1-1), 29,000 U.S. lives would have been
saved in the 1997–2008 period.
The United States is larger and more diverse than any of the nations with which it is
compared above, so a more meaningful comparison might be between other countries and U.S.
regions with similar geographic characteristics (e.g., U.S. regions with population density and
urbanization similar to those of European countries). Indeed, the fatality rate in the New
England states about equals the rates in the best-performing countries abroad. However, no U.S.
state has matched the median speed of improvement (a 5 percent annual reduction in the fatality
rate) among the foreign countries shown Figure 1-1.
The causes of these disparities in highway safety experience among the high-income
countries are not well understood. Government traffic safety policies are a significant influence.
However, research has shown that differences in demographic, geographic, and economic factors
and in characteristics of vehicle fleets and transportation systems also affect international
differences in crash rate trends, and evaluations designed to test the causal linkage between
interventions and crash rates rigorously have been conducted too infrequently. Because crash
risk varies with driver age, time of day, road characteristics, and other factors, it is possible for
Country A to have a lower aggregate fatal crash rate than Country B and yet that a driver in
Country B would always have a lower risk of a fatal crash than a driver in similar circumstances
in Country A. For example, fatality rates on urban roads are generally lower than on rural roads
worldwide. If Country A were predominantly urban and Country B rural, B could have lower
fatality rates than A on both urban and rural roads and yet still have a higher total rate than A.
The convergence of national fatality rates to similar values in recent years (in the range of
0.6 to 1.0 fatality per 100 million vehicle kilometers) suggests the possibility that, as rates
become lower, it becomes more difficult to obtain further reductions comparable in absolute
terms with the reductions of earlier decades. From this point of view, the slow improvement of
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Introduction 13
TABLE 1-1 Traffic Fatality Rates in Six Countries, 1970 and 2008
Fatality Ratea
1970 2008 Percent Change
France 9.0 0.78 –91
Germany 7.8 0.65 –91
Great Britain 3.7 0.52 –86
Australia 4.9 0.65 –87
Japan 9.6 0.81 –92
United States 3.0 0.78 –74
a
Fatalities per 100 million vehicle kilometers.
SOURCES: OECD n.d.; NHTSA 2010; OECD and International Transport Forum 2010.
Average annual percent reduction in fatalities per VKmT, 17 countries,
1997-2008
9
8
annual percent reduction
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FIGURE 1-1 Average annual percentage reduction in fatalities per vehicle kilometer
traveled, 17 countries, 1997–2008. Netherlands value is for 1997–2005. (Sources: OECD
n.d.; OECD and International Transport Forum 2009; OECD and International Transport Forum
2010; NHTSA 2010.)
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14 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
TABLE 1-2 Traffic Deaths in Six Countries, 1997 and 2008
Traffic Deaths
1997 2008 Percent Change
France 8,400 4,300 –49
Germany 8,500 4,500 –48
United Kingdom 3,700 2,600 –29
Australia 1,800 1,400 –18
Japan 11,300 6,000 –46
United States 42,000 37,400 –11
NOTE: The United Kingdom includes Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
SOURCE: OECD n.d.
the U.S. fatality rate might not seem to be cause for concern, since the U.S. rate was already
relatively low 15 years ago, and the other countries have simply been catching up to a level of
performance that the U.S. achieved earlier. However, this interpretation of the trends is
contradicted by the experience of several countries (including the United Kingdom, the
Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, West Germany, and Australia) that already had rates
close to or lower than the U.S. rate in 1997 but nonetheless reduced their rates faster than did the
United States in the past decade.
Chapter 2 presents a more detailed comparison of safety trends in the United States and
other countries and among U.S. states. It also reviews research on the causes of differences in the
trends.
NATIONAL STRATEGIES
Several of the countries that have achieved lower fatality rates and faster safety improvement
than the United States also have undertaken rigorous, sustained, and carefully planned safety
initiatives that are internationally recognized as innovative. Features of programs in four
countries are given below as examples.
• France progressively strengthened its laws and enforcement efforts concerning seat
belt use, drunk driving, and speeding during the 1990s. Then in 2002, the national government
initiated a program for reducing fatalities by intensified enforcement, relying especially on
automated speed enforcement coordinated with a public communication and marketing
campaign. The initiative is centrally planned and administered; a central facility monitors the
nationwide network of 2,300 automatic speed cameras, issues citations, and collects fines. It is
supported by central data collection and analysis to guide management and measure results. The
initiative has had sustained, high-level political support. At the beginning of his 2002 term, the
president of France announced that traffic safety was among the top priorities of his
administration, and a cabinet-level multiagency committee has met periodically to oversee the
safety program. The program produced important reductions in average speeds throughout the
road system (a two-thirds reduction in the fraction of vehicles exceeding speed limits by more
than 10 km/h between 2001 and 2008). As noted in the preceding section, France has achieved
one of the fastest rates of improvement in traffic safety in the past decade. Government analysts
attribute a large share of the reduction to the enforcement program.
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Introduction 15
• Australia has a federal system of government, so major responsibilities for highway
safety rest with the states, and innovative programs have emerged at the state level. The safety
programs of the state of Victoria have received international attention. A series of formal plans
has guided the Victoria program since 1990. The plans identify quantitative safety improvement
targets, intervention strategies for meeting the targets, and requirements for interagency
coordination. New regulations and enforcement strategies and added enforcement resources
have targeted drunk driving, speeding, and oversight of new drivers. Speed limits in urban areas
have been reduced, and automated speed enforcement is widely used. Random alcohol and drug
testing of drivers is frequent, and the average driver can expect to be tested once every few years.
Performance measurement is integrated with administration of the program. The program
receives active support from elected officials, who make up the Ministerial Road Safety Council
and Parliamentary Road Safety Council that oversee the state’s safety program. Traffic safety
has been, at least at times, a high-visibility political issue. Victoria achieved a greater percentage
reduction in traffic fatalities than Australia as a whole over the period 1988–2004.
• United Kingdom traffic safety programs share some basic similarities with the
programs in France and Australia: consequential national planning that incorporates targets and
performance measurement, political visibility and high-level political support, and application of
progressively more rigorous interventions over the past 20 years. As elsewhere, drunk driving
and speeding have been important targets. A national blood-alcohol content (BAC) limit was
enacted in 1967, 11 years before all U.S. states had such a limit. As in the United States, random
alcohol testing of drivers is illegal; however, drivers in crashes and drivers stopped for traffic
offenses may be tested. Laws and enforcement practices are largely uniform nationwide,
although local government authorities have certain management responsibilities. Widespread
deployment of automatic speed enforcement devices was coordinated and funded by a program
of the national government from 2001 to 2007. Nongovernmental organizations, including the
automobile clubs, were instrumental in starting the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) and
the Road Assessment Program (RAP) in the United Kingdom and other countries in the 1990s.
These programs rate vehicles and roadway segments for safety and publicize the ratings. The
U.K. rate of fatalities per vehicle kilometer, among the lowest in the world, has been lower than
the U.S. rate since 1990 and has continued to decline more rapidly than the U.S. rate. The speed
of improvement over this period has been similar to those of the Scandinavian countries and
Australia (Figure 1-1).
• Sweden’s road safety program also is based on effective national planning and
sustained political support and has emphasized control of drunk driving and speed. The driver
BAC limit (0.02 percent) is among the lowest in the world, and random alcohol checks are
conducted. The speed control program aims to reduce average speeds throughout much of the
road network, and many speed limits have been reduced since the 1990s. In 1997, the Swedish
Parliament established the Vision Zero policy to guide Swedish safety programs. It sets zero
road fatalities and injuries as the appropriate goal of transportation programs and places
responsibility on road authorities and vehicle regulators for designing a transportation system
that is forgiving of the errors of drivers. In practice, Vision Zero has been interpreted to mean
that road designs and traffic and vehicle regulations should favor injury prevention more strongly
than conventional considerations would dictate—for example, lower speeds and more frequent
property-damage crashes in return for fewer serious injuries. Safe design of the highway system
has entailed various traffic calming measures (road design features like narrow lanes and traffic
circles that cause drivers to reduce speed) and rules to minimize conflicts between motorized and
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16 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
nonmotorized traffic. Sweden’s fatality rate per kilometer of vehicle travel has been the lowest
in the world for most of the past 20 years, and progress in reducing the rate has been faster than
in the United States (Figure 1-1).
Programs of these benchmark nations are described in more detail in Chapter 3, where
the sources of information for the above descriptions are cited.
STUDY ORIGIN AND CHARGE
Some past analyses have found deficiencies in U.S. traffic safety efforts at each of the three
functional levels identified above: for unfocused management practices, for reliance on
ineffective countermeasures, and for failure to sustain political and public support. These
criticisms are relevant to the committee’s charge because they are hypotheses about the sources
of the differences in safety performance between the benchmark nations and the United States.
The following three subsections cite examples of such criticisms. They describe the views of
others and are not conclusions of the committee. The final section explains how the committee
took into account these criticisms of U.S. practice in responding to its charge.
Unfocused Management
Most comparisons of U.S. and international safety efforts have noted differences among
jurisdictions in safety program management practices. For example, the members of one of
FHWA’s scanning teams that observed safety programs abroad were struck by the results of
greater application of measurement and evaluation as management tools in other countries
(MacDonald et al. 2004, xiii):
The scan team found examples in which the processes of setting priorities and making
planning, investment, and management decisions are based on, or use, performance
measures to a much greater extent than is typical in the United States. In those cases
where performance measures were used as input to priority setting, the process
represented a new level of organizational behavior. . . . Perhaps the most impressive
application of performance measurement, in terms of showing how the process can
influence governmental policy and budget determinations, was in the area of road safety.
Impressive results in reducing fatalities and injuries have occurred in some of the sites the
scan team visited through a comprehensive program of engineering, enforcement, and
education.
Another comparison of safety management and planning in the United States and
Australia, after noting “a sound and realistic plan” as one of the factors accounting for success of
Australian programs, observes that “lack of progress reduces the FHWA [1998] strategic plan to
little more than a publicity piece, since the results have so little relationship to the goals. During
the eight years since the plan was announced, there has been little tracking of results, and almost
no mid-course corrections to ensure that the goals are being met” (Tarnoff 2007, 22).
The 2008 report of the OECD Working Group on Achieving Ambitious Road Safety
Targets, which compared programs of OECD nations, also emphasizes “a robust management
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Introduction 17
system” as a critical factor distinguishing successful from unsuccessful programs (OECD and
International Transport Forum 2008, 16–17; see also Box 3-4 in Chapter 3).
The FHWA report Halving Roadway Fatalities, on lessons for U.S. safety programs from
the Victoria, Australia, program (written by one of the designers of the Australian program),
similarly ranks management practices higher than any specific countermeasure among the
critical factors accounting for Victoria’s relative success in reducing fatalities (Johnston 2006,
16):
Note that there is nothing [among the identified critical factors] about specific measures.
The keys are knowing what the big problems are, selecting interventions known to be
effective, and systematically implementing those for which political and community
support can be garnered. Different packages of measures will have different aggregate
impacts, require different levels of investment, and operate on different time frames, but
many different packages will work.
In other words, according to this view, systematic, results-oriented, data-driven management can
produce safety progress with the tool kit of countermeasures that is available to the responsible
agencies. Jurisdictions that fail to make progress are those that lack adequate overall long-term
management of their safety programs.
Any comparison of management methods in other countries with those of the United
States must take into account the highly decentralized structure of U.S. government. The U.S.
federal government regulates motor vehicle safety and the safety of commercial truck and bus
operations, but otherwise its involvement is indirect, exercised through rules imposed on state
and local government recipients of federal highway and traffic safety grants. State governments
build and operate intercity roads; state police enforce traffic regulations mainly on major roads;
state laws and courts govern driver licensing, vehicle inspection, speed limits, impaired driving,
and other aspects of traffic safety. Local governments operate local streets and roads, enact local
regulations, and provide local police and courts that enforce traffic laws within their
jurisdictions. In contrast, most of the benchmark countries’ governments are relatively highly
centralized; for example, a national police force may conduct most traffic enforcement.
Australia’s federal system has similarities to the U.S. structure, but no country’s institutions
match the thousands of U.S. entities with independent authority for public safety and for road
maintenance and operation.
Ineffective Countermeasures
The committee’s charge (given earlier in this chapter) asserts that interventions aimed at
modifying driver behavior explain the relatively rapid declines in traffic fatalities that the
benchmark nations have experienced. The most prominent behavior modification initiatives in
these countries have targeted speeding and drunk driving. The managers of these programs
attribute their success to a great extent to these interventions. For example, France’s safety
statistical agency estimated that three-fourths of the sharp reductions in fatalities and injuries on
French roads between 2002 and 2005 resulted from a decline in speeds over the period induced
by the speed control program begun in 2002 (CISR 2006, 6). With experiences like this in mind,
the report of the OECD Working Group on Speed Management promised rapid reduction in
fatalities through more effective regulation of driver behavior (OECD and ECMT 2006b, 3):
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18 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
Speeding . . . is the number one road safety problem in many countries, often contributing
to as much as one third of fatal accidents and speed is an aggravating factor in the
severity of all accidents. . . .
Research indicates that coordinated actions taken by the responsible authorities can
bring about an immediate and durable response to the problem of speeding. Indeed,
reducing speeding can reduce rapidly the number of fatalities and injuries and is a
guaranteed way to make real progress towards the ambitious road safety targets set by
OECD/ECMT countries.
Similarly, a review of the history of road safety policy in France, written by a participant
in the development of the policies, emphasized the power of behavior modification. The author
attributes the large and rapid improvements in France and the other cases cited to government-
organized campaigns of “psychological and media shocks” that combined stricter driver behavior
rules (in particular with regard to speeding and drunk driving), stronger enforcement, and harsher
penalties with well-funded and forceful public communication programs. The author concludes
that this experience demonstrates that “all other things being equal, i.e., for a given population,
road network, and vehicle fleet, the level of road crashes is in no way an incompressible figure
and may vary considerably depending on the policies pursued by the authorities. An
examination of crash trends shows that these may sometimes be rapidly cut by a quarter or a
third, and even, in rare circumstances, by half” (Gerondeau 2006, 3).
In comparison, U.S. safety programs have been faulted for concentrating on vehicle and
infrastructure improvements while underemphasizing measures to control unsafe behavior more
effectively. In the assessment of one safety researcher (Evans 2004, 389–408), the lag between
percentage reductions in fatality rates in the United States and reductions achieved in other
countries in recent decades reflects a “dramatic failure of U.S. safety policy” (Evans 2004, 390).
Under the failed policy, “U.S. safety priorities have been ordered almost perfectly opposite to
where technical knowledge shows benefits are greatest” (Evans 2004, 389). In particular, the
author argues, policy has concentrated on regulation of vehicle design and safety features, which
are of lesser value, and has neglected countermeasures aimed at altering the driver behavior
factors that are the major determinants of risk. A similar criticism by public health professionals
labeled U.S. safety policy “a public health failure” for neglecting to take advantage of the
potential for “immediate, large and sustained reductions of deaths and injuries” through more
rigorous speed control (Richter et al. 2001, 176, 177).
Improving road safety by upgrading infrastructure and imposing safety design standards
on new road construction (e.g., with regard to alignment, lane width, sight distance, and roadside
clear zones) are central elements of the safety programs of the U.S. and state departments of
transportation and of other nations’ road authorities. However, statistical analyses of the factors
related to differences in traffic safety among countries or states have failed to find a strong
correlation between the level of infrastructure investment and crash rates or frequencies (Noland
2003; Kopits and Cropper 2005). One such study concluded that this finding shows that traffic
safety policy has been misdirected: “Changes in [U.S.] highway infrastructure that have
occurred between 1984 and 1997 have not reduced traffic fatalities and injuries and have even
had the effect of increasing total fatalities and injuries. This conclusion conflicts with
conventional engineering wisdom on the safety benefits of ‘improving’ highway facilities and
achieving higher standards of design. . . . Other factors, primarily changes in the demographic
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Introduction 19
age mix of the population, increased seat-belt usage, reduced per capita alcohol consumption,
and improvements in medical technology are responsible for the downward trend in total fatal
accidents” (Noland 2003, 610).
The arguments of the researchers cited above regarding the relative effectiveness of
categories of interventions highlight the difficulty of the problem of deciding on the best
allocation of resources in the design of a long-term safety strategy. However, they cannot be
regarded as definitive. Specific limitations of studies of the effect of infrastructure investment
on safety are described in Chapter 2. Indeed, as Chapters 2 and 3 will describe, all strong
statements about the causes of differences in safety trends among the high-income countries
must be examined skeptically because data limitations seriously hamper historical research and
because, even in the countries with the most advanced management systems, safety program
evaluations often are lacking or are inconclusive.
These arguments also are not fully consistent with the philosophies of the safety
programs in the benchmark nations with the best safety records, all of which incorporate safe
vehicle design and safe infrastructure design in their comprehensive strategies. Examples
mentioned in the preceding section are the principle that roadway design should be error-tolerant
that is part of Sweden’s Vision Zero framework and NCAP and RAP in the United Kingdom.
The “sustainable safety” principles that are the guiding philosophy of the national road safety
program in the Netherlands call for a systems perspective that seeks to optimize the performance
of all components of the road transportation system, including infrastructure, vehicles, and
drivers (OECD and ECMT 2006a, 228). The Halving Roadway Fatalities report on Australia’s
safety programs explains the mix of measures used in that country as follows (Johnston 2006,
15):
While evaluation research has shown high levels of effectiveness for most of these
measures, it would be wrong to assume that Australia’s success turned entirely on the
implementation of behavior-control measures. It is more that, of all the measures in the
traffic safety toolbox, legislation and intense enforcement, supported by public education
to secure community support, are the types of interventions most likely to produce
systemwide results in a short timeframe. Australia has also benefited greatly from
improvements in vehicle and road infrastructure safety. Indeed, the strategic plans now
emerging focus on the need for greater investment in creating and maintaining a safe
system.
Australia’s current safety plans (described in Chapter 3) have adopted a comprehensive
framework known as the safe system approach, which is directed at attaining safer speeds,
designing roads and roadsides more forgiving of human error, promoting use of vehicles with
features that reduce the likelihood of a crash and injury severity in a crash, and providing aid and
incentives to road users for responsible driving. The various safety interventions operate over
differing timescales. As Chapter 3 will describe, this difference has influenced the safety
strategies of the benchmark countries. Intense enforcement has been demonstrated to produce
immediate benefits in a number of countries. Investments in safe infrastructure accrue over time
as the investment program is carried out over many years. Similarly, vehicle design changes
take greater effect as the vehicle fleet modernizes over time. Some of the benchmark countries,
searching for the means to continue improvement after the immediate gains of intense
enforcement have been achieved, have renewed emphasis on the longer-term strategies.
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20 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
Lack of Political and Public Support
The study charge acknowledges that rigorous safety interventions depend on public and political
support and directs the committee to examine how this support was built in the benchmark
countries. Lack of support for road safety action has been cited as the underlying source of poor
performance of U.S. programs. For example, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)
has commented as follows: “Motor vehicle crash deaths on U.S. roads exceed 40,000
annually. . . . Yet society responds with something akin to a collective shrug. . . . Traffic safety
laws that are known to be effective—and that are implemented in other countries with little or no
controversy—often are resisted by U.S. politicians” (IIHS 2002, 1–2). IIHS cites federal
research funding as an indicator of the low priority that the public assigns to highway safety,
noting that the National Institutes of Health’s 2001 budget for dental research was five times the
research budget of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. IIHS cites as well weak
media coverage of traffic safety issues and the success of organized public opposition to such
measures as motorcycle helmet laws and red light cameras as indications of low priority.
U.S. observers consistently have noted that the successful national programs rely on
measures that are regarded in the United States as politically controversial or legally
impermissible. State officials encounter public objection and interest group opposition to such
measures as radar detectors, speed limit reductions, automatic speed and red light enforcement,
helmet laws, seat belt laws, sobriety checkpoints, and reduced BAC limits. A summary of
FHWA’s international safety scanning tours compared U.S. attitudes and institutions with those
in other countries as follows (Baxter et al. 2005):
Partly because of cultural differences . . . [other] countries may be more successful than
the United States in implementing certain behavioral practices, such as seatbelt usage or
prevention of impaired driving. Expectations about implementation may need to be
adjusted because some countries can adopt practices at a national level that can be
implemented only at a State or local level in the United States. Similarly, the political
context in the United States may inhibit adoption of certain technologies that are more
readily accepted in other countries, such as speed enforcement cameras.
A compendium of 22 invited papers on Improving Traffic Safety Culture in the United
States: The Journey Forward (AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety 2007) addressed the question
of cultural factors influencing traffic safety outcomes. The articles, by authors from diverse
disciplinary backgrounds, do not present empirical analysis of the relation of cultural factors to
safety performance or of the effectiveness of interventions intended to change cultural attitudes,
although there are references to such research in another area (for antismoking campaigns). The
summary document (Hedlund 2007) contains a list of 20 actions derived from the papers, which,
the author proposes, could contribute to producing cultural change. These recommendations
include better communication with the public, communication across professional disciplines,
planning and management based on performance goals, design of intervention programs based
on scientific evidence, and research on the determinants of risk and on the elements of effective
programs. Nearly all these amount to more effective performance of management functions that
are already part of every state traffic safety program.
More recently, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and another transportation
organization have proposed that the administration hold a White House conference on traffic
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Introduction 21
safety as a means of lending high-level political support to transportation safety initiatives (AAA
Foundation for Traffic Safety 2009).
That differences among societies in values and attitudes account for differences in traffic
safety performance is a credible hypothesis, and a few studies have examined it empirically. A
Belgian study examining why that country had one of the highest traffic fatality rates in Europe
in 2000 found that the European countries have similar laws but nonetheless divergent results
and noted a correlation between country fatality rates and an index of perceptions of the degree
of corruption in public life. It concluded that “countries . . . where people are not convinced of
the necessity of compliance with imposed measures, do not perform well in traffic safety
improvement” and that public attitudes toward law-abiding behavior partly explain differences in
the impact of traffic safety legislation (Vereeck and Deben 2003, 17, 21). An update of the
Belgian study that used the same measure of attitudes toward authority concluded (on the basis
of a statistical analysis of fatalities for 15 European countries for 1995–2002) that a major share
of Belgium’s relatively high rate of traffic fatalities per vehicle kilometer of travel could be
explained by the country’s higher alcohol consumption (which itself might be regarded as an
indicator of social norms), but that Belgium’s higher score on the index of perception of the
degree of corruption in public life also appeared to account for an important part of the
difference (Vrolix and Vereeck 2006). The authors explain that “[the Corruption Perceptions
Index] was used as a proxy for the general attitudes and social norms of citizens towards traffic
legislation and policy. . . . In countries where corruption figures are low . . . it is assumed that
law-infringing behavior is less tolerated” (Vrolix and Vereeck 2006, 43).
A second empirical study examined correlations of traffic fatality rates per capita in 46
countries in 2007 with measures of quality of governance developed by the World Bank and with
empirical measures of national cultural values taken from the sociology literature (Gaygisiz
2010). The study found that fatality rate correlates negatively with quality of governance,
positively with cultural measures characteristic of traditionally hierarchical societies, and
negatively with measures indicative of personal autonomy and egalitarianism. However, the
simple correlations do not control for international differences in income, which is strongly
correlated with fatality rate and with most of the cultural measures. The author concludes that
“since cultural values . . . are almost impossible to change or would change very slowly . . . and
the quality of governance seems to have both direct and indirect impact on traffic safety, the
development programs aimed at the improvement of the governance quality of institutions may
play an important role in changing the traffic safety conditions” (Gaygisiz 2010, 7).
The comparison of Australian and U.S. planning cited above concludes that “perhaps
most important [in the United States] there has been little legislative support for the use of
techniques that will ensure these goals [of the 1998 FHWA strategic safety plan] are met. There
is little point in strategic planning without assurance of the needed underlying support” (Tarnoff
2007, 22). The case studies of implementation of specific countermeasures that are presented in
Chapter 4 cite instances where measures of proven effectiveness that are applied in some U.S.
jurisdictions are rejected in others because of controversy or active opposition. In other
instances, inaction may be the result of lack of public demand or inattention on the part of
responsible officials rather than active opposition.
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22 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
Committee’s Approach to Its Charge
The various hypotheses about the causes of international differences in traffic safety progress are
not mutually exclusive. Opportunities undoubtedly exist in the United States to reduce the costs
of road crashes through improvements at all three levels of safety programs: through
management reforms, wider application of the highest-payoff interventions, and more consistent
political support. Most probably, sustained progress will require competent application of the
full range of available interventions in a balance that is appropriate to the individual
characteristics of jurisdictions.
The task statement asserts that the benchmark countries’ fatality rate trends are explained
by their behavioral (i.e., anti–drunk driving and speeding) interventions. However, the
committee’s perspective has been that claims of the effectiveness of particular intervention
programs or overall national strategies must be subjected to critical scrutiny. The claims that
merit the greatest weight are those supported by rigorous and objective quantitative evaluation.
In many instances such evaluations were not available. Therefore, as Chapter 2 explains, the
committee concluded that the causes of trends in national rates are incompletely understood.
As described above, the benchmark countries typically attribute their successes to
comprehensive and balanced strategies that seek to reduce risk through interventions involving
vehicle and road design, pedestrians, and emergency medical services as well as driver behavior
regulations. The committee did not interpret the study charge reference to altering driver
behavior as ruling out investigation of the role of other categories of intervention in explaining
international differences. The committee’s examination of specific interventions in Chapters 3
and 4 covers occupant restraints, motorcycle helmets, and infrastructure improvements as well as
antispeeding and anti–drunk driving campaigns (as case studies of methods rather than a
comprehensive survey of interventions). The actions recommended in Chapter 5 include
measures to improve the effectiveness of enforcement of antispeeding and anti–drunk driving
laws as well as measures to strengthen infrastructure hazard elimination programs and occupant
protection regulations. The recommendations regarding management practices are intended to
increase the effectiveness of all categories of interventions.
The committee considered the charge to imply three questions that U.S. policy makers
and transportation program administrators must answer to profit from the experience of other
countries:
• What are the sources of the declines in highway injury rates in Europe, Australia, and
the United States, and especially, what has been the contribution of government safety
programs?
• What are the necessary elements of successful national risk reduction programs?
These elements may include safety management systems, the specific interventions employed,
structures of administrative oversight and accountability, political support and leadership, and
strategies for building public and political support.
• What institutional or social differences between the United States and other countries
might affect the success of efforts to transfer safety practices, and can any of these factors be
altered to create a U.S. environment more conducive to safety improvement?
This study has not definitively resolved the question of the sources of differences in
national rates of improvement in traffic safety, and the committee has not attempted to outline a
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Introduction 23
comprehensive program to replicate the successes of other countries in the United States. The
results of the study are more modest: in comparing the safety programs of the United States and
other countries, the committee found certain gaps in the United States in program elements that
appear to be prerequisites for progress. The most critical of these gaps may be in the
management and planning capacities that safety agencies require to direct safety programs
toward attaining defined goals. The recommendations propose measures to begin to close these
gaps as first steps toward a more successful U.S. safety program.
OUTLINE OF THE REPORT
The remainder of this report is organized as follows. Chapter 2 describes trends in traffic
fatalities and crashes in other countries, the United States, and U.S. states and reviews studies of
the forces driving these trends. Chapter 3 contains a summary of conclusions of past studies
about key elements of the most successful traffic injury reduction programs in other countries,
descriptions of programs in five countries (Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, and the United
Kingdom), and descriptions of aspects of the organization of U.S. state and federal safety
programs for comparison with the other countries’ programs.
Chapter 4 compares practices in the United States and other countries and among U.S.
states in five categories of safety intervention: speed control, control of drunk driving, road
hazard analysis and elimination, motorcycle helmet regulations, and seat belt regulations. These
five areas were selected as case studies. The committee did not comprehensively survey all areas
of safety practice. The selection of the interventions described in Chapter 4 was dictated mainly
by the emphasis that the prominent benchmark countries place on these interventions in their
accounts of their safety successes. The committee did not have independent means of verifying
that these program areas are indeed the primary sources of other countries’ progress. Among the
areas the chapter does not examine are countermeasures aimed at distracted driving and
aggressive driving (i.e., the complex of hazardous behaviors that includes speeding, illegal
passing, tailgating, weaving, and ignoring signals), truck safety, driver training, vehicle safety
rating, emergency medical services, and graduated drivers’ licensing, some of which (e.g.,
graduated licensing) are areas of U.S. success and leadership.
Chapter 5 presents the committee’s conclusions and recommendations. The conclusions
identify the accomplishments of the benchmark nations, sources of success, and differences
between U.S. and international practices. The recommendations, addressed to elected officials
and to government safety professionals and administrators, identify actions needed in the United
States to emulate the successes that other countries have achieved.
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Abbreviations
CISR Comité Interministériel de la Sécurité Routière
ECMT European Conference of Ministers of Transport
FHWA Federal Highway Administration
IIHS Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
NHTSA National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
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24 Special Report 300: Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
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Introduction 25
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