发布时间 : 星期日 文章道路交通安全中英文对照外文翻译文献更新完毕开始阅读e44ce9e410a6f524cdbf85a6
Vision Zero – Implementing a policy for traffic safety
Keywords: Vision Zero Road Safety Implementation Abstract
The scope of this paper is to outline, in a general way, the safety philosophy inherent in present road- and street design, trace the origin of this philosophy, and to present the principles for a new design of streets and roads. It will be argued that deficiencies in the present road design philosophy are the main cause of the global road safety crisis, clearly indicating its man-made nature. A brief description is made of the decision process leading to the establishment of Vision Zero as Sweden?s Traffic Safety Policy in 1997.
Following an analysis of the problem, suggestions are made for finding solutions. The solutions are based on some of the principles in Vision Zero. They include a new basic mechanism for creating error-tolerance in the road system, and new design principles for road- and street design.
The tradition of “blaming the victim” is hereby questioned and focus is put on the need for professionals to act based on these new standards. During the last 10 years the fatalities in Sweden have dropped from approximately 550/year to 450/year. Roads redesigned with median barriers have an 80% reduction in fatalities. Streets with 30 km/h design speed show similar results. This indicates that measures derived from Vision Zero strategy are effective but that large scale implementation has not yet been done.
1. The process
The Swedish Road Administration (SRA) had an overall responsibility for Road Traffic Safety in Sweden since 1993. This responsibility was further clarified by the Government in 1996. Sweden has very small Ministries (number of personnel). As a consequence Administrations like the SRA often have semi-political tasks like development of policies and targets. Decisions on policy, long term targets and overall budgets are made by the Government or the Parliament but development is made in the Administration.
Following the elections in the autumn 1994 Sweden got a new Minister for Transportation. The Minister declared that traffic safety would be one of her priorities.
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A dialog was started between the Minister?s Staff and the SRA on how the Minister could make traffic safety a prioritized subject.
In the spring of 1994 the SRA together with the major stakeholders for traffic safety had presented a short term program for action for the years of 1994–2000. It had the character of continuing earlier work but with more emphasis on cooperation between key actors and focus on results. Directly after this program was launched the SRA started to develop some basic ideas for a long term strategy for traffic safety. It had been recognised for some time that the contemporary traffic safety paradigm had some problems (Johansson, 1991). Part of this problem was a lack of expected benefits of many measures, something that was recognised by among others Gerald Wilde (best described in Wilde, 2001). A comprehensive overview can be found in OECD (1990).
The new safety paradigm, Vision Zero is built around the basic idea that even if not all crashes or collisions can be avoided, all severe injuries can, in principle, be avoided. The basic idea was to build a “safe system” where all predicted crashes and collisions had tolerable health losses. The Minister and her Staff recognised that it was possible to work with the ideas behind Vision Zero in a political setting and quickly adopted the basic ideas, developed a text (translated in Belin et al., 1997), and took it to the Parliament in 1997, where it was accepted by all political parties (Tingvall, 1998). Since then, the Parliament has repeated this decision on a number of occasions. The notion of “Vision Zero” has become synonymous with the concept of “high political ambitions” in a number of other areas as well. The Government in 2008 took a decision on a Vision Zero for suicide. Much of the political debate on Vision Zero between 1995 and the Parliament?s decision in 1997 was concentrated on the question”How many fatalities can we accept?” At this time Sweden had around 500 fatalities in road traffic per year. Comparisons where made with the safety level for other transport modes, (clearly a zero fatality goal), occupational safety (about 50 fatalities annually), electricity (about five fatalities annually). From this political analysis it was concluded that a zero fatality target was the only justifiable target for road traffic.
During the same time period SRA and its network concentrated work on developing strategies for radically lowering fatality risks in road traffic, typically aiming at reducing fatality risks with a factor 10. Examples follow later in this paper.
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