Applying the Safe System Approach to Transportation Planning, Design, and Operations (2025)
Chapter: Practical Implications for Guidance
Practical Implications for Guidance
At the end of the project, the research team has gleaned useful information about the philosophies and approaches of Safe System-adopting countries, as well as the perspectives of professionals attempting to transition toward a Safe System. From the wide-ranging literature review, practitioner survey, and series of focus groups, the team secured significantly more clarity on how to present Safe System implementation guidance. The following sections provide reflective summaries on the practical guidance-related implications of what was learned about survey respondents’ organizational climates, their perspectives on 75 safety practices, and their thoughts on how states, regions, and municipalities in the United States might begin transitioning toward a Safe System.
Respondents’ Organizational Climates
The project team acquired useful information about respondents’ organizational climates and how their organizations were more likely to possess an auspicious degree of innovativeness and lower levels of fatalism. This finding suggests participants’ organizations are generally open to experimenting with novel, road user protective practices, a precondition to transcending the status quo in organizational routines (Patterson et al., 2005; Guay, 2013). It remains to be seen whether and how organizational innovativeness explains or predicts agencies’ safety cultures or levels of investment in safety programming.
Safety Practices
Survey respondents’ perspectives on various domain-specific and cross-domain safety practices revealed several critical insights.
- First, those practices receiving relatively high impact and high feasibility scores from practitioners tended to:
- Be in wide adoption or heavily researched (e.g., installing leading pedestrian intervals with right-turn-on-red restrictions in areas with high pedestrian activity; improving sight distance at intersections by restricting parking at the corners (daylighting); instituting immediate administrative license revocation or suspension (ALR/ALS) for alcohol- and drug-impaired driving offenses; installing centerline rumble strips on undivided highways; enforcing a statewide primary enforcement seat belt use law).
- Require consistent coordination across professional sectors (e.g., incorporating road safety audits in project scoping/planning phases, forming a task force or community coalition of law enforcement, transportation, public health, members of the community, and other partners to investigate serious crashes and report findings and proposed changes to the public).
- Reflect a modest alteration of traditional approaches (e.g., prioritizing injury risk-based (systemic) safety assessments over crash “hot spot” or “black spot” approaches).
- Second, removing the perceived political, financial, or social feasibility associated with safety practices reveals how effective safety practices are often stymied by social and political reaction. For example:
- Implementing speed safety cameras (automated speed enforcement) that use revenues to improve safety.
- Implementing or expanding car-free zones in areas with high pedestrian activity.
- Installing travel lane reconfigurations (road diets / reconfigurations) on multi-lane roads with fewer than 20,000 AADT.
- Requiring alcohol ignition interlocks installed for all drivers convicted of DUI.
- Third, eight practices were presented to more than one type of practitioner. For example, requiring alcohol ignition interlocks installed for all drivers convicted of DUI was presented to law enforcement and policy professionals. Ratings of these cross-domain practices showcased how:
- The installation of leading pedestrian intervals (LPI) with right-turn-on-red restrictions in areas with high pedestrian activity was considered relatively more feasible to implement among policymakers and researchers than it was to roadway operations and maintenance professionals. Perhaps this was because those in roadway operations tend to focus on the mechanical and operational aspects of LPIs, finding them cumbersome to install, whereas policymakers and research might focus on LPIs’ political tenability.
- Instituting or enforcing a statewide universal motorcycle helmet law was deemed less feasible among policymakers and researchers than it was among members of law enforcement. It may be that universal motorcycle helmet laws are considered relatively straightforward to enforce, yet potentially difficult to enact politically. The same pattern was true for instituting immediate administrative license revocation or suspension (ALR/ALS) for alcohol- and drug-impaired driving offenses. That is, policymakers thought this practice less feasible to implement and of lower safety effectiveness than had law enforcement professionals.
- Operations and maintenance professionals considered the deploying of joint action plans with emergency services partners to integrate operational planning with emergency services planning as more impactful on road users’ safety than had post-crash response professionals. This may be because operations and maintenance professionals can visualize what joint action plans with emergency services partners might entail, whereas post-crash response professionals may have limited experience with such joint action planning.
- Law enforcement members believed forming a cross-sectoral task force to investigate serious crashes to be less feasible and impactful of road users’ safety than did post-crash response professionals. As many law enforcement professionals have experience investigating crashes, they may be less open to sharing this responsibility with other professional groups and thus more likely to consider collaborative crash investigations as not worthy of investment.
- Fourth, those practices considered high impact, low feasibility tended to require substantial financial and logistical investment [e.g., establishing a TIM system that documents roadway and incident clearance times, as well as secondary crashes, converting conventional signalized intersections to single-lane roundabouts].
- Finally, those practices professionals considered less worthy to pursue included those that require user input (e.g., encouraging and facilitating public use of self-reporting to capture collisions and other events falling outside the scope of traditional crash reporting) or could amount to an invasion of privacy (e.g., promoting the installation of technology in private automobiles that records drivers’ distraction, drowsiness, and other forms of incapacitation).
Focus Group Insights
Focus grouped insights helped the team shape the Safe System implementation guidance. Whereas professionals’ appraisals of various safety practices provided insight into those practices that harbor promise to be implemented in the near future (i.e., those practices that scored well on their safety impacts, but rather poorly on their social, fiscal, political feasibility), such as:
- Placing serious crashes in a time- or place-based context when engaging news media partners (law enforcement);
- Implementing VSL in the vicinity of traffic incidents (roadway operators);
- Installing permanent barrier protected bike lanes on arterial roads (designers);
- Coordinating with land use planners to align land use and roadway purposes (e.g., deciding whether the road’s purpose is access- or mobility-centered) (transportation planners); and
- Implementing red-light camera enforcement that uses revenues to fund safety infrastructure (policymakers).
Focus group participants offered insights into how cross-sectoral partners can effectively align goals and actions to meaningfully involve community representatives in decision-making, promote access to simpler, more streamlined funding for safety efforts, and advance policies and practices to proactively prepare for ever-shifting social and environmental conditions.
Each of these insights have informed the content, structure, and flow of the domain-specific guidance chapters. More specifically, practitioner survey results and focus group findings have shaped the proposed steps to implementing key domain-specific safety practices. They have also influenced the organization of the Safe System Self-Assessment resource found in the Safe System Implementation Guidelines.
