Resources

ITE applauds USDOT Secretary Buttigieg's leadership in issuing this Call To Action. "ITE will continue to be a strong advocate for use of the Safe System Approach and reaffirms our commitment to helping our members implement this strategy to save lives," said Jeff Paniati, CEO and Executive Director, ITE. ITE is among the nation's "First Movers," 49 organizations and businesses recognized by the USDOT as having already committed to help reverse the crisis that is killing more than 40,000 people each year in America.

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) commends the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the release of the department's new National Roadway Safety Strategy (NRSS), setting a goal of zero roadway fatalities and adopting the Safe System Approach. The NRSS embraces a human-centered focus founded on the Safe System Approach, which seeks to advance the complementary objectives of Safer People, Safer Roads, Safer Vehicles, Safer Speeds, and Post-Crash Care. It recognizes that achieving this ambitious goal will require a USDOT-wide approach working with stakeholders across the country.

The Safe System Strategic Plan provides a roadmap for the advancement of the Safe System Approach in the U.S. It describes the Safe System Approach, discusses the process involved in building the plan, outlines how to advance a Safe System mindset, and describes steps necessary to implement Safe System practices within the transportation community in the U.S. This plan focuses on the role of road system owners and operators in applying the Safe System Approach to design, build, and operate safer roads. This plan aims to educate transportation professionals on the effectiveness of the Safe System Approach while also offering guidance on how to prioritize safety in the U.S. as a means to achieving zero traffic fatalities.

The Safe System approach offers a unique opportunity to improve the value of our roads, enhancing their benefits to mobility and reducing their negative consequences. Road travel is much safer now than 50 years ago, but the rate of improvement started slowing in the 1990s and the problem has remained essentially unchanged over the past 10 years-- persisting as the leading cause of death for teens and young adults. The Safe System approach not only promises to break this stalemate, but holds the potential to drive deaths toward zero.

The Safe System Approach aims to reduce serious injury and fatal crashes by designing and operating roadways in a manner that anticipates human error and accommodates human injury tolerances. Safe System applications vary based on roadway conditions, type, and safety interventions necessary, and they range from separating users in space or time to increasing attentiveness to reducing impact forces. The following case studies outline the Safe System Approach applied on some of the more common types of roadway serious injuries and fatalities in the United States. The case studies outline on-the-ground practices in the following three areas of need: major thoroughfares, intersections, and pedestrians. While few U.S. states or cities are comprehensively using the Safe System Approach, the case studies outline key elements of the Safe System Approach applied by public agencies, both large and small, across the United States.

"Imagine that, in 2050, not a single person in the United States dies in a traffic crash." This powerful--but hard-to-imagine-scenario--is the premise behind a comprehensive stakeholder effort captured in the RAND report for the Road to Zero (RTZ) Coalition titled, The Road to Zero: Achieving Zero Deaths by 2050.

Safe Systems Framework

Safe Systems Explanation

Road to Zero Coalition Safe Systems Working Group

According to the World Health Organization, traffic crashes claim the lives of more than 1.25 million people annually and are the leading cause of death in young people between the ages of 15 and 29 (World Health Organization, 2018). The economic and societal costs from these incidents are tremendous. In the United States in 2016, The National Safety Council estimated that the costs of road trauma (deaths, injuries, and property damage) were $432.5 billion (National Safety Council, 2016). Improvements in road safety have been achieved over the last few decades from advancements in vehicle safety, law enforcement, and safety education; however, the number of traffic-related fatalities and injuries is still significant. In recent years, these numbers have increased in countries of all economic backgrounds, including the U.S. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2016).

This report transmits the results of a wide-ranging literature and policy scan of international practices that fall under the scope of Safe Systems. Safe Systems, though difficult to define, is generally regarded as a framing philosophy of roadway transportation that entails the needs and efforts of all involved stakeholders in promoting a safe and healthy transportation system. Although the focus of Safe Systems is generally a reduction-to-zero of fatal and injury crashes, a more general reduction of total crashes and an overall improvement of health are in view. In this report, we document how we arrived at this general understanding of Safe Systems, and the practices that inform such an approach to road safety. It is our hope that this report contributes a much-needed meta-analysis to the transportation safety field and informs future policy decisions at all levels of government.

More than 1.25 million people are killed on roads each year, the majority in developing countries, making traffic fatalities the tenth leading cause of death worldwide. Children, elderly and poor people are particularly vulnerable. Are drivers and pedestrians always to blame? Research from WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and the Global Road Safety Facility of the World Bank finds that the most effective way to prevent traffic deaths is a systemic approach that shifts responsibility away from the drivers and pedestrians using roads to the city planners and officials designing them. Analysis in 53 countries found that those that have taken a "Safe System" based approach have achieved both the lowest rates of fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants and the greatest reduction in fatality levels over the past 20 years.

Thirty-five thousand people die on U.S. roadways each year--the equivalent of a completely full jumbo jet crashing weekly--leaving no survivors.1 The vast majority of these deaths occurred on roadways funded with state and federal dollars and designed according to state and federal guidance or standards. In other words, how we design transportation infrastructure has a direct impact on the unacceptable safety outcomes we have experienced.