Introduction

One of the most noticeable trends in government is the attempt to straddle both first and third world ways of dealing with issues, often with disastrous results.

The global road safety crisis.

Almost 30 years ago, a revolutionary idea changed the way Europe regarded road collisions. It has probably saved countless lives, but it’s yet to be fully accepted by politicians.

In 1995, a serious crash occurred on the E4 motorway near Stockholm, Sweden. Five young people were travelling in a hatchback car when the vehicle rolled near the exit ramp for the Ikea store. The car smashed into a concrete structure supporting a streetlight by the side of the road, and all five passengers were killed.

They were probably speeding, and as the road was wet, they probably aquaplaned. The car was a three-door Peugeot 205 GTI.

Sweden’s turning point

We shall work with Sweden (population 10.5 million 2024) as our case study on how to deal with deaths from road accidents. 1in 1995, more than 500 people died on Sweden’s roads. However, the accident mentioned above signalled a turning point in how the country and, eventually, the world regarded road crashes. An estimated 1.2 million lives are lost globally to road traffic accidents. That’s about 100,000 per month or just over 3,000 every day. Globally, he estimates that at least 100 million people have died on the roads since the birth of the motor car. Millions more suffer life-changing injuries. While the death toll has decreased slightly over the past 13 years, the number of fatalities on the world’s roads are 5% lower than they were in 2010. This is according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has a target of halving the number of road deaths by the end of this decade.

Sweden has some of the lowest rates of road traffic fatalities in the world, and the story of how the country has strived to bring that number down to zero provides a lesson for other countries, such as Kenya, where the death toll has remained stubbornly high.

Rethinking safety beyond car technology

In the 1990s, the road safety world was focused on technological measures such as seatbelts, car seats for children and airbags. These measures softened the impact of what is sometimes called “the second collision” in car crashes – the impact of passengers within a vehicle, moments after a crash has occurred.

However, this approach didn’t go far enough. The car can’t solve everything, because it doesn’t work like that. You soon reach the bottom of the safety net of the vehicle.”

Road accident injuries were a result of combining a speeding mass with the built environment and many other variables, including road conditions and the driver’s behaviour, as well as the safety features on the vehicle.

This “systems” approach wasn’t new to road safety experts, but it differed from the way officials looked at road collisions, which was primarily through a criminal justice lens.

After the crash near Stockholm, the regional director of the transport authority was asked what he planned to do following the incident. The reply stated the authority would swiftly replace the concrete lamppost.

When there was a demand that all such supports be removed, since they were clearly a hazardous feature to have right next to a road, and work began to improve Sweden’s “clear zones” next to roads, it caused disquiet among officials. Wasn’t changing the road layout tantamount to admitting liability for the crash?

There are those who did indeed believe that the authorities were responsible, not for reckless driving, or for the crash itself, but for the fact that the incident was as fatal as it was. And within a couple of years, Swedish parliamentarians would align themselves with this way of viewing road safety.

They said: ‘You, as provider of the road transport system, are no longer allowed to kill people on that mass level that you’ve done.

Road transport developed in relative freedom, outside the control of a safety culture that put the preservation of life beyond all other values.

This sets it apart from other modes of transport. Those who travel by plane or train have high expectations of safety. Of course, accidents do occur, but stringent protocols mean these are relatively rare events. Even for dangerous jobs like construction work or oil drilling, safety is of paramount value. Workers are kept safe by a mix of training, protocols and equipment, planned by experts in recognition of the risky nature of the work.

But from a very early point in the development of the motor car, the industry decided to focus the attention of lawmakers away from the inherent danger posed by cars to the actions of the person behind the wheel.

Officials were no longer allowed to design roads for idealised drivers who never became distracted or exceeded the speed limit.

There was a lot of blame directed at the driver, and a lot of willingness to go after reckless drivers aggressively because they were a threat to the reputation of the industry. Traffic enforcement principles were really developed by the auto industry itself, directly, which sponsored traffic enforcement training for police officers.

The manufacturers paid to establish the Traffic Division of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which advised police forces on traffic enforcement.

But bad drivers weren’t the only target of car manufacturers; pedestrians were often involved in crashes too, so they lobbied for the development of highways that excluded them, but which also encouraged people to drive faster.

The resulting idea that persists today to some degree could be considered analogous to the infamous slogan from the National Rifle Association of America: Cars don’t kill people, people do.

That outlook is changing, though. While the US is lagging behind Europe and Australia in improving road safety, there is increasingly a “safe-systems approach” inspired by strategies such as Vision Zero, says Bruce Hamilton, executive director of the Roadway Safety Foundation, a road safety charity that is one of two successor organisations from the ASF. “We have more than four million miles (6.4 million km) of roads here in the US, so we have a lot of work to do,” he says. He says the car-centric approach to road safety that dominated car, city and street design for decades, and the focus on regulating driver behaviour is changing in favour of redesigning and upgrading road infrastructure.

There are significant challenges, though. “Half of our road fatalities occur on rural roads in the US,” Hamilton says, which means that ensuring adequate funding to address safety problems can be difficult.

With individual road users carrying the moral and legal weight of road crashes, officials at transport authorities were free to prioritise other things. However, road safety must be balanced with other variables, including cost, driver preference and the impact on the economy of changing traffic flows.

The birth of Vision Zero

In Sweden, the real moment of change came some months before the crash south of Stockholm, when Ines Uusmann, the minister for infrastructure, asked, simply: “How many deaths should we have as our long-term target in Sweden?”

The reply was: “Zero.” When the Minister said she was interested and would like to hear more. This was the beginning of an approach to road safety known as “Vision Zero”.

Uusmann, who had a background in the Trade Union movement, was familiar with the principles of workplace safety. With her support, Vision Zero quickly gained traction. Aiming for zero road deaths seemed to many, and still does seem to many, to be utopian and unrealistic. But that target is an inevitable consequence of an authority taking back responsibility for road safety from individual drivers, and to aim for zero.

On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Vision
Zero and Road Safety
Society Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that transport designers were responsible for maintaining the road system, while drivers were expected to drive responsibly and follow the rules. However, a further clause stated that:

“If the road users do not adequately assume their share of the responsibility, for example, due to a lack of knowledge or skill, or if personal injuries occur or risk occurring for other reasons, the system designers must take additional measures to prevent people being killed or seriously injured.”

This meant that officials were no longer allowed to design roads for idealised drivers who never became distracted or exceeded the speed limit. They had to make roads for real people who made mistakes.

It should be up to the professional community to make sure that normal people, making normal mistakes, don’t lead to them killing themselves or someone else.

Even intentional law-breaking was to be considered when designing the system. The reality is that drivers do speed, and they get distracted by their phones or other passengers in the car. We cannot pretend that there are laws that you know everyone will follow. That is a very unprofessional approach. You would never do that in aviation or in other areas where you really care for safety.

Designing roads for real humans

Collisions are more common on roundabouts than at intersections, but they are much less deadly.

One of the key actions that came from Vision Zero was to conduct internal investigations of every fatal road collision in Sweden in parallel to any criminal investigation. The pattern that began to emerge revealed that crash victims were not, as many in the road transport sector assumed,  drunk and irresponsible drivers. For the most part, they were people who made small mistakes within a system that had no margin for error.

The Vision Zero was developed by many like-minded individuals from diverse backgrounds. From the Karolinska Institute, there was an expert in reconstructing crashes from photographs, an engineer, and Sweden’s head of road safety. Each played a different role.

To underline the shift in thinking, an artist was commissioned to create a series of strange illustrations, which were used in presentations about Vision Zero. They showed everyday scenes, but with the risks of horizontal kinetic energy – i.e. speed – transposed to height. The effect showed pedestrians walking along pavements and crossings next to dizzying, precipitous drops.

After decades of government campaigns that aimed to change driver behaviour, the pictures came as a shock. They didn’t depict dangerous drivers – one pair of images didn’t show drivers at all – but a network of roads that seemed to pose an inherent risk to people going about their everyday lives. The onus fell to transport planners – not drivers – to fix that situation.

There was a notorious section of the E4 highway north of the city of Gävle, in which 21 people had lost their lives in the previous eight years. The reason was head-on collisions, caused by drivers who fell asleep at the wheel or lost control of their cars in dangerous conditions, drifting across the road.

A proposal was made to use this section to trial a median barrier made of wire rope. Cars would still be able to overtake on sections where a second lane became available – a so-called “2+1” road.

The road safety community was deeply sceptical. Why would anyone put obstacles in the middle of a road? Surely that would lead to more crashes, as it was assumed that people were going to crash into that barrier.

The Swedish National Society for Road Safety thought the trial was horrendous, and an editorial opposing the plans appeared in a respected national newspaper. When consulted, only 0.3% of the residents living near the road thought it was a good idea. Nevertheless, the trial proceeded.

After a few weeks, they had their first crashes. They went well, if one can call it that. The organisers even had a cake sent to them by a woman who said she owed her life to the new barrier. She had been distracted in the car by her sick dog, and had swung into the middle of the road, hitting the barrier instead of the oncoming traffic.

The results of the trial showed that even if the number of crashes increased because of the barrier, they would be much less deadly.

Within six months of the trial on the E4, the Swedish Transport Administration found that the majority of the Swedish public said they wanted median barriers on their roads, and they began to quickly spread through the country’s rural road network. Research has shown that after they were installed, 2+1 roads cut the number of people killed and seriously injured by half and they have saved more than 1,000 lives.

This effort to focus on the deadliest types of crashes led the Swedes to borrow the roundabout – also known in the US as a ‘rotary’ – from the UK. They are now a common sight in Scandinavia. Collisions are more common on roundabouts than at intersections, but they are much less deadly, because cars move slowly and in the same general direction.

Tingvall didn’t just look at road layouts. “In 1995, motor journalists looked at cars and said, ‘It feels solid – it’s probably safe as well,'” he recalls. The following year, the Swedish Transport Authority helped create, together with the UK, a voluntary rating system for cars to show consumers which models were safest.

The European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) received support from governments and motoring associations, but manufacturers were resistant. However, when a Volvo model emerged from the tests as the safest, the accolade became a cornerstone of the company’s marketing, and the industry woke up to the importance of safety for drivers.

How Vision Zero spread across the world

Tingvall took Vision Zero to Australia in 1998, where it was renamed the “safe system” approach. In 2002, it was formally adopted by Sweden’s neighbour, Norway, while at the municipal level Vision Zero has been implemented in dozens of cities around the world, from Barcelona to Bogota.

In 2011, it was adopted as part of the EU’s road safety strategy. In the following decade, deaths on European roads fell by about one-third, while in the US, deaths went up, even when accounting for changes in population size.

It should be noted that European road deaths were already declining prior to 1995, and some of the recent gains would probably have happened without Vision Zero. Moreover, because Vision Zero describes a mindset and a method – rather than a to-do list of actions – it’s hard to say where it begins and ends.

Swedes still associate the term with those median road barriers, but almost any safety intervention could fall within a Vision Zero plan, so long as it is evidence-based. Norway has 179 actions on its current Vision Zero plan – they range from installing median barriers on 435 km (270 miles) of national roads to promoting first aid training for the public.

And while Vision Zero looks at more than just the actions of the person behind the wheel, dangerous drivers are not let off the hook: in Spain, Vision Zero initiatives include cracking down on drink driving, while in south-west England, the public is invited to submit videos of reckless lawbreakers. Meanwhile, in cities, Vision Zero is most often associated with measures to protect pedestrians and cyclists.

There are five global examples of Vision Zero interventions:

• From 2016-2019, Bogota, Colombia achieved a 14% reduction in traffic fatalities by reducing speeds, implementing safe school zones, and other measures
• In 2023, New York City broke a record by installing 300 miles of protected bike lanes in one year
• Georgia has improved post-crash response times by moving from three emergency phone numbers to one and creating a national command centre
• In London, lorries weighing over 12 tonnes now need to have a safety permit proving their drivers have good visibility from their cabs before they enter the city
• In Odisha, India, more than 12,000 people living in areas with high rates of car crashes have received first aid training

In February 2020, Sweden hosted a High-Level Conference on Global Road Safety for the United Nations. A group of Swedish experts put together a set of recommendations and targets that would go on to enshrine Vision Zero in road safety policy for the UN, WHO and OECD.

The so-called Stockholm Declaration was agreed by around 140 members and was seen as an equivalent, for road safety, of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. It kick-started the UN and WHO’s Second Decade for Action for Road Safety, which aims to cut road deaths and injuries by half globally by 2030.

The future of road safety

That would be impressive – but what about zero? Will Sweden ever have a year when no one is killed or seriously injured as Tingvall envisioned?

“Not in my lifetime,” says Tingvall. “But I’m pretty old. Around 2050, maybe.” But he adds that Vision Zero has been more successful than he anticipated. By some metrics, in some places, we are glimpsing zero: in 2019, Helsinki and Oslo reported zero pedestrian fatalities; in the Norwegian capital, only one driver died that year. The general approach is to reduce deaths from cars by restricting their use; Oslo removed more than 1,000 parking spaces to discourage driving; Helsinki narrowed roads and widened pavements.

But there are still areas of unfulfilled potential. One way is for road administrators to be held to account with a legally binding code of conduct, like that of doctors.

And while officials publicly back the idea of shared responsibility, police and prosecutors investigate crashes as they always have, with the emphasis still on the actions of individual road users. It is even thought that road safety should be declared as a human right, to ensure people take it seriously.

“It’s an extreme standpoint, and it goes against the Stockholm Declaration,” Tingvall says. “It’s extreme because the knowledge today is that there is no negative impact of speed restrictions on motorcars – you can even squeeze out more accessibility.

Perhaps counterintuitively, research shows that slowing vehicles down typically makes little difference to journey times in cities – it may even make it quicker to get from A to B. That is because the traffic flow will be more harmonious, with fewer cars changing lanes and fewer collisions.

A spokesperson for the UK’s Department for Transport told the BBC that while 20mph (32km/h) limits can be an important safety measure in residential neighbourhoods and around schools, local authorities should ensure they are supported by local communities and not used as blanket measures in inappropriate areas.

Roundabouts may not reduce the number of collisions between vehicles, but they do help to cut speeds and so deaths.

It is regrettable that speed limits are still subject to political and public debate, rather than being set by experts who understand the risk that different road systems pose to the human body. “No one would dream of letting the Parliament set the speed limits for trains, or maximum load weights for bridges, since they are technical limits. Regardless of how hard it may sound, democracy does not stand above physical laws.

At the same time, speed-limiting technology is approaching a point of great life-saving power. All new cars sold in the EU now come with Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) as standard. Vehicles identify the speed limit on a stretch of road and either cut engine power if the car is speeding or give an audible warning. Drivers can override the function or deactivate it altogether, but their actions will be recorded on a “black box” type device.

In time, cities will have the opportunity to “geofence” sensitive areas like schools to slow all motorised traffic down – something that effectively happens already with London buses, which are fitted with speed-limiting technology. Such a move would provide the ultimate example of transport authorities taking back responsibility for road safety.

Tingvall believes that Vision Zero has one more trick up its sleeve – and it could change the nature of the debate altogether. Building on his experience with Euro NCAP, he is currently working with the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) – the group which oversees motorsport and represents motoring organisations around the world – to create a safety rating system for organisations. So far, they have calculated the “safety footprint” of just one company: the petrochemical giant TotalEnergies.

Tingvall believes this could supercharge the way Vision Zero is implemented, leading to road safety improvements in supply chains that cross into the developing world, and removing the debate from the political sphere. Safety, Tingvall believes, is just like climate change – you can deny the science, but at the risk of your credibility.

“Of course, you need courage. A lot of courage,” says Tingvall. “The courage for someone in public authority to say, ‘This is where I draw the line between listening to politics, listening to science and also human rights.'”