Tackling the road safety crisis: saving lives through research and action
The Paris ring road is notorious for traffic jams – Copyright AFP STR
Road safety in the U.S. has continued to worsen in recent years despite significant investments in motor vehicle safety research, says a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report.
Traffic deaths and serious injuries have climbed over the past decade, and this U.S. crisis brings with it high human, social, and economic costs, including an estimated 40,000 deaths each year and nearly $500 billion yearly in monetary damages.
The rate of incidences has not been even, highlighting issues with U.S. society’s divisions. Minority communities and vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and bicyclists, have faced disproportionate impacts.
There have been some improvements and while the direction of road management and in transportation and public health agencies is changing to be more inclusive of matters such as energy consumption, the environment, surrounding communities, and the safety of all road users, there are significant gaps and shortcomings. These are called out in the report.
Previous studies have addressed the same issues, and in some cases made similar recommendations, but most of those recommendations have not been pursued, even as the country’s previous long-term gains in road safety waned.
The report offers a coordinated set of actions intended to achieve more impactful outcomes that can be sustained over time, highlighting opportunities to address a range of issues. It says that with the right changes in strategy, evidence-based research on road safety can be translated into practice and that the U.S. can make meaningful advances.
As part of these efforts, USDOT should establish a coordinated, data-driven national road safety research strategy across all federally funded safety programs. Persistent gaps in research agenda in relation to national crash outcomes is indicative of the lack of national-level guidance in road safety research planning and programming; consequently, the report also calls for systematic research to confirm the validity of safety guidance for practitioners, and to eliminate outdated and unproven guidance.
Among the report’s other recommendations, USDOT should consider the creation of a National Road Safety Research Center to both raise the general profile of U.S. road safety efforts and to efficiently support the technical resources, guidance, tools, research products, and skilled workforce needed to make early and sustained progress in the quest for zero deaths and injuries from traffic-related crashes.
Tackling the road safety crisis: saving lives through research and action
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