A Safe System: Why Does Vehicle Design Matter So Much?
Why is the Road to Zero Coalition focusing on vehicle design? After all, aren’t there multiple factors determining whether a crash happens and how severe it will be?
Yes – and all those factors interact at the moment of a crash to potentially make the difference between life and death. That’s why the Road to Zero Coalition bases its work around the Safe System Approach, a framework for understanding how to best prevent traffic deaths and serious injuries. This approach was also adopted by the U.S. Department of Transportation for its National Roadway Safety Strategy. It represents a new way of thinking that goes beyond seeing serious crashes as a matter of one person’s responsibility and moves towards viewing our situation as an interaction of factors, where everyone has a role to play.
The Safe System Approach is based on the following key principles:
● Death and serious injuries are unacceptable: If they are preventable, then zero can be the only ethical goal
● Humans make mistakes: To err is human – the consequences shouldn’t be fatal to anybody
● Humans are vulnerable: Our bodies can only withstand so much force
● Responsibility is shared: It’s not just drivers, but people who design the roads, regulate the drivers and design the vehicles who have a role in preventing serious crashes
● Safety is proactive: Work to mitigate known problems before a death happens, rather than responding later
● Redundancy is crucial: Having multiple layers of prevention ensures one error of judgment or adverse action won’t lead to disastrous consequences
The five components of the Safe System Approach are safer people, safer vehicles, safer speeds, safer roads and post-crash care. None of these exists in a vacuum, and none is more important than the other because they all interact.
For example, driving fast increases the risk that a collision will happen and that it will be fatal. If that speed is being traveled by a heavy vehicle with a high, blunt front end, then the risk to pedestrians, cyclists and occupants of smaller cars increases even more. And if the driver of that vehicle has made an unsafe decision, such as driving while intoxicated or distracted, then the odds of avoiding a crash get worse. To ensure a serious crash doesn’t happen in this situation, we need safer vehicles, traveling at safer speeds, driven by safer people.
That’s a system – and that’s how we get to zero.
Perhaps safer vehicles haven’t received as much attention as other components of the Safe System Approach. After all, we assume that vehicles are getting safer as years go by – but safer for whom?
As shown in the Road to Zero report Massive Hazards: How Bigger, Heavier Light Trucks Endanger Lives on American Roads, the proportion of all roadway fatalities that are people inside vehicles has declined, while the burden for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists has increased. And as the share of vehicles on the road that are SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks increases, some drivers remaining in smaller cars may feel that they, too, have no choice but to upsize for their own safety, keeping up with the majority. So while it may be a personal choice to buy a light truck, it’s also a choice that is influenced by what is available on the market, and how people naturally are concerned about their own protection first.
It’s also reasonable to believe that if a vehicle is allowed to be sold in the United States, then it must meet certain standards of safety. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are indeed mandatory for all light trucks on the market today, and the federal government also sets the requirements for the New Car Assessment Program – the crash test star ratings you may have seen when you last bought a vehicle. But these standards have historically not taken the safety of people outside the vehicle into account. This is changing: In September 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of USDOT, proposed a new rule for a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard to require new vehicles be designed to minimize head injuries in collisions with pedestrians. It’s a start – but there is still a lot more that must be done to create safer vehicles.
Check out Road to Zero online resources, where you can learn more about the Safe System Approach, sign up for our newsletter, join the Coalition and even apply for a grant to help you advance Safe System projects where you live.
Like the network of roads linking communities across the United States, all our efforts are connected, and in the mission to save lives and reduce serious injuries, we’re all in this together.