We are working on safe mobility for all. The Safe System Approach is how we’ll get there together.
Every person should be able to travel safely, regardless of age, ability, income, mode, location, or the mistakes people inevitably make.
ITE brings together the people, knowledge, tools, and leadership needed to eliminate transportation fatalities and serious injuries. The Safe System Approach anticipates human error, manages kinetic-energy risk, acts before tragedy occurs, and builds multiple layers of protection into every decision.
Safety is not a tradeoff. It is the condition for mobility.
Safe mobility means that people and goods can reach their destinations without an unacceptable risk of death or serious injury. It does not require perfect behavior. It requires a transportation system that anticipates mistakes, accounts for human vulnerability, and prevents routine failures from becoming tragedies.
Every decision or lack of decisions involving land use, access, design, speed, operations, maintenance, vehicles, technology, enforcement, or emergency response shapes safety outcomes.
Vision Zero establishes the goal of eliminating transportation fatalities and serious injuries; the Safe System Approach provides the framework for achieving it. This approach recognizes that people make mistakes and that the human body has a limited ability to tolerate crash forces. The system must be planned, designed, operated, and maintained so that mistakes do not result in death or serious injury.
For more information on Vision Zero, please visit the ITE Vision Zero Webpage.
The Safe System Approach moves beyond reactive, behavior-centered approaches to roadway safety by recognizing human fallibility and vulnerability and building multiple layers of protection into the transportation system rather than relying primarily on perfect individual behavior.
A Safe System considers the needs of everyone who uses the transportation system, whether walking, bicycling, rolling, using transit, or driving, and regardless of age or ability. It also recognizes that the conditions in which travel occurs are shaped well before a person enters the roadway. Land use, transportation options, roadway design, speed, vehicles, and post-crash care all influence exposure to risk and the consequences when something goes wrong.
DelDOT's and other states' adaptations of the Safe System wheel reflect this broader systems perspective by explicitly including Land Use as a sixth Safe System element. This reinforces the connection between transportation and the built environment and recognizes that decisions about development patterns, destinations, access, and travel options can affect exposure, likelihood, and severity.
The Safe System principles below provide the foundation for these elements and should guide decisions throughout the transportation system.
No transportation related death or life-changing injury should be treated as an inevitable cost of mobility.
Safety must be a foundational condition in decision-making, not one consideration to be traded away after cost, schedule, capacity, or political pressure is introduced.
Even well-trained and responsible people will misjudge, misunderstand, become distracted, or make an incorrect decision.
The transportation system must anticipate foreseeable mistakes and prevent them from becoming fatal.
The human body has a limited ability to withstand crash forces.
Speed, mass, protection, and conflict angle must be managed so that kinetic energy remains within survivable limits.
Everyone who plans, designs, funds, regulates, builds, operates, maintains, manufactures, responds to, and uses the transportation system has a role.
Individual responsibility remains important, but it cannot replace the responsibility to create a system that does not depend on perfect behavior.
Known risks should be addressed before someone is killed or seriously injured.
Use roadway characteristics, speed, exposure, conflicts, land use, community knowledge, and other indicators to find and mitigate risk, not only past crash locations.
No single person, treatment, technology, or program will always work as intended.
Build multiple independent layers of protection so that when one layer fails, another prevents death or serious injury.
The Safe System webpage was developed in partnership with the Road to Zero Coalition and members of the RTZ Safe System Working Group. To learn more about how the Safe System Approach creates multiple layers of protection, visit the ITE Safe System page.
We first need to look at exposure. How much Kinetic Energy are we putting into the system? What modes are people using? How long are the trips?
Then we can look at severity. What is the speed and mass of the potential crashes?
Next, we can look at likelihood, where conflict points occur. Do we have grade separated crossings, or do we have an uncontrolled crosswalk?
Speed management is critical to mitigating kinetic-energy risk and eliminating transportation fatalities and serious injuries. Speed management is the coordinated use of land use, roadway design, operations, technology, appropriate speed limits, and evaluation to achieve target speeds that minimize fatal and serious-injury risk. The objective is not limited to reducing speeding; it also includes addressing harmful speeds that may be legal but are incompatible with the roadway context, expected conflicts, or human tolerance.
Roadway design and operations should do the primary work of producing the target speed. Self-explaining roads make the appropriate speed intuitive, while speed limits, technology, enforcement, communication, and education provide reinforcing layers.
The Speed Management for Safety resource hub provides guidance on understanding speed risk, establishing target and posted speeds, selecting design and operational measures, and developing a coordinated speed-management program.
Urban and suburban environments contain frequent interactions among people walking, bicycling, rolling, driving, using transit, making deliveries, and accessing adjacent properties. Safety depends on aligning roadway function, land use, operating speed, access, and the needs of all users.
In many suburban environments, wide roadways, long blocks, high operating speeds, limited crossing opportunities, and separated land uses increase exposure and the potential severity of crashes. Safe System strategies include connected transportation networks, transit-supportive development, lower target speeds, self-explaining roadway design, access management, shorter and safer crossings, and separation where substantial differences in speed or mass exist.
Explore related ITE and partner resources:
Rural transportation safety presents distinct challenges, including longer distances to services, limited transportation options, higher operating speeds, facilities with limited recovery areas or separation from severe conflicts, transition zones, long emergency-response distances, and conflicts involving animals or slow-moving vehicles. Lower traffic volumes do not eliminate risk, and crashes that occur at higher speeds are more likely to result in death or serious injury.
Rural safety strategies should proactively address exposure risks, access to transportation options, speed, roadway departures, intersections, roadside hazards, transition areas, visibility, access, maintenance, and post-crash response while recognizing the staffing and funding constraints faced by many rural communities. Below are some resources that can be used by professionals in rural areas to improve transportation safety:
The ITE Transportation Safety Campaign Resource Hub is a centralized platform created to support transportation safety advocates and professionals in developing, enhancing, and sharing effective educational safety campaigns. It provides access to a variety of safety campaign examples, key campaign components, and contact information for further collaboration. Communication and education can prepare decision-makers and communities to support necessary policy, design, operational, and funding changes.
Emergency responders, law-enforcement professionals, transportation operators, and incident-management personnel put their lives on the line to protect the public and assist people after crashes. Transportation systems and stewards should support their success through safer roadway design, coordinated operations, reliable communications, effective incident management, and safe access to crash scenes, not rely on them to compensate for preventable risks.
ITE provides courses, certifications, webinars, publications, and other professional-development opportunities to help transportation professionals apply the Safe System Approach and strengthen their safety knowledge and practice.
Every year throughout the United States and Canada, more than 40,000 lives are lost due to road related fatalities. The Road Safety Professional (RSP) certifications 1 and 2 distinguish those individuals who have dedicated their careers to the continued improvement of our roadways and their safety features for all road users. These certifications are supported and sponsored by the Transportation Professional Certification Board (TPCB) in collaboration with other transportation and safety related organizations in the United States and Canada since 2018 to recognize road safety as a profession, establish a standardized level of practice and knowledge, and continue educational advocacy for the transportation public. For more information on the RSP Professional Certifications 1, 2 and SA, please click the links below.
The ITE Transportation Safety Council and Committees collaborate and share best practices so that safety is prioritized in all surface transportation investment decisions. Join us to advance your technical knowledge, share effective practices, and support the integration of safety into transportation policies, programs, projects, and investment decisions. For more information, explore the pages below:
The ITE Road Safety Audit Great Idea Group (RSA GIG) connects practitioners interested in advancing formal, proactive safety reviews of existing and future transportation facilities. RSAs use an independent, multidisciplinary team to identify potential safety concerns for all road users and recommend opportunities to reduce risk before those concerns result in fatalities or serious injuries. The group supports peer exchange, practical application, and professional development, complementing ITE’s Road Safety Audit Fundamentals Training Course and FHWA’s RSA guidance. For more information, contact Alyssa Thomas at athomas@ite.org.