The Safe Systems Pyramid: A new framework for traffic safety

Civil engineers play an outsize role in shaping the built environment, which plays an outsize role in health, especially in transportation safety. While there is growing interest in integrating public health and transportation engineering and planning to improve safety outcomes, existing efforts fall short. The authors review prior efforts to integrate public health into transportation safety, and frameworks from injury prevention and control and risk management. Based on the Hierarchy of Controls and the Health Impact Pyramid, the authors present a framework for prioritizing policies and interventions, known as the Safe Systems Pyramid, that contains five ascending levels – Socioeconomic Factors, Built Environment, Latent Safety Measures, Active Measures, and Education. The levels of the framework prioritize increased population health impact and decreased individual effort. Frameworks like “The 3 E’s” emphasize collaboration rather than a change in thinking and action among transportation safety professionals, and do not prioritize specific actions. The authors argue that Vision Zero and other “Safe Systems” prioritize implementation of policies, programs, and infrastructure to increase population health impact by considering the individual effort necessary to obtain a protective effect. This framework is designed to shift the thinking of engineers, planners, and policy makers that shape the transportation system. The authors conclude this work by applying the Safe Systems Pyramid to a hypothetical Vision Zero program, highlighting how the framework can be used to prioritize efforts using a Safe Systems approach.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2023.100905
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198223001525
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/25901982
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Ederer, David
  • 0000-0002-6362-2099
  • Panik, Rachael Thompson
  • Botchwey, Nisha
  • Watkins, Kari
• Publication Date: 2023-9

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 100905
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives
  • Volume: 21
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 2590-1982
  • Serial URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/transportation-research-interdisciplinary-perspectives
• Publication flags:

  Open Access (libre)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Policy making; Public health; Safety culture; Traffic safety; Transportation engineering
• Identifier Terms: Safe System; Vision Zero
• Subject Areas: Highways; Policy; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01893077
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Sep 13 2023 10:23AM