Transport Planning and Traffic Safety 

TRIPP, the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, had earlier (in 2005) brought out, The Way Forward: Transportation Planning and Road Safety which may, in a manner of speaking, be considered a prequel to the present volume. Certain important areas of concern do overlap but the problems of safety and mobility are eternal while the context of time and place is onstantly shifting and changing, hence the periodic need to review and reassess the subject under consideration. TRIPP has been organizing an annual International Course on Transportation Planning and Traffic Safety since 1991. The structure and content of the course has been modified every year based on the feedback received from the participants and the Course faculty.

The content of Transport Planning and Traffic Safety: Making Cities, Roads, and Vehicles Safer is based on the lectures delivered in the course, supplemented by relevant additional texts. This book is intended to be the source book for road safety training courses as well as an introductory textbook for graduate level courses on road safety taught in engineering institutes.

In recognition of the importance of Road Safety as a major health issue the World Health Organisation has declared 2011–2021 the Decade of Safety Action. Several countries in Europe, North America and Asia have been successful in reducing fatalities and injuries due to road traffic crashes; however, many low income countries continue to experience high rates of traffic fatalities and injuries.

This book brings together the international experience and lessons learnt from countries which have been successful in reducing traffic crashes and their applicability in low income countries. The content is interdisciplinary and aimed at professionals – traffic and road engineers, vehicle designers, law enforcers, and transport planners. The objective is to highlight the public health and systems approach of traffic safety with the vulnerable road user in focus.

The road safety performance of economically developed OECD countries over the last century shows a remarkable and consistent pattern. In most of these countries, road traffic deaths were rising until the 1960s but have declined steadily since then. Understanding the road safety history of OECD countries can provide useful insights to road safety professionals in low-and middle- income countries (LMICs) to help them better manage safety in their transportation systems.

This chapter examines the trends in performance of OECD countries through three perspectives. The first considers the rising and falling trends in road traffic deaths as a natural developmental process (“economic determinism”). In this perspective, road traffic injuries increase initially as a society motorizes but injuries begin to decline after the society reaches a certain developmental threshold, after which it begins to address its health and environmental issues. The second perspective critiques this position by illustrating that the rising and falling trends can partly be

explained by the shift in risk that occurs when motorization is primarily through increasing car-use. As the use of cars increases, the risk to pedestrians initially increases. However, eventually most pedestrians become car users and further motorization reduces the number of pedestrians and hence their exposure to road traffic injuries.

In the final perspective, we look at the issue

through the lens of a political process. We reassess the statistical data to show that the late 1960s were a special moment in history when the OECD countries that were at substantially different income levels acted together to regulate transport risk by establishing and funding national road safety agencies. Over the following decades, these institutions were able to implement large-scale national road safety programs that have had a remarkable effect on reducing the road death toll.

The main implication of this perspective for LMICs is that countries do not need to wait to be richer to address road safety. Instead, they should act now to establish national institutions with the mandate and resources to regulate and manage road safety in their transportation system.

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