Applying the Safe System Approach to Transportation Planning, Design, and Operations (2025)
Chapter: Safe System Implementation Framework
Safe System Implementation Framework
System Operator Responsibility
Under this Safe System organization principle, professionals involved in designing roads and vehicles, as well as those providing injury surveillance and coordinating post-crash care and trauma response are collectively responsible for maximizing the safety of the designs and operations. In short, system operators should be held accountable for delivering the road-using public a Safe System (Job et al., 2022).
Learning and Innovating
As social and political norms shift and technologies become more commonplace in the market, Safe System professionals and researchers will need to remain nimble and flexible in their work. They will need to extend questions such as “Does this countermeasure work?” to include conditions, such as “Does this countermeasure work, why does it work—i.e., what are its change mechanisms—and in what contexts does it work?” Assuming an orientation of continual learning and innovating is more in keeping with the complex system we all operate within. It would benefit road safety professionals and researchers to ascribe to this perspective and establish means of providing both holistic understanding of their community’s road trauma patterns and injury contributors (Curry et al., 2019; Fix et al., 2022), as well as timely feedback on the safety risks (Montella et al., 2020; Jurewicz and Excel, 2016; McHeim et al., 2021) and performance (Cloutier et al., 2021) of implemented countermeasures. Iterating, learning, and innovating in this way can help safety analysts account for demographic shifts and simultaneously implemented policies in their safety impact assessment, something deterministic crash modification factors cannot do (Noland, 2013).
Vertical Integration
If we are to use Safe System Death/Serious Injury is Unacceptable, Safety is Proactive, and Redundancy is Crucial principles as our guide, we must arrive at a point where road user safety is embedded in regional development decision-making, just as it needs to be central to project planning (Dumbaugh, et al. 2019; Tayarani et al., 2018; Bax et al., 2014). A promising approach to forecasting the safety implications of land developments across regions in the United States is to augment long-range planning applications with crash prediction models, thereby providing policymakers with a priori information on the potential safety impacts of various development scenarios (Abdel-Aty et al., 2011).
Horizontal Integration
At more local levels of government, transportation planners and urban designers need to coordinate their site plan reviews, corridor audits, street standard policies with local land use planners and coding officials. The alignment of these two disciplines would ideally help to harmonize the transportation and land use systems in ways that vastly improve the safety of road users (Heanue, 1998; Combs and McDonald, 2021) by systematically rendering roads “self-explaining” with clear mobility or access purposes (Dumbaugh, et al., 2020). This approach to horizontal integration will hopefully stymie the reoccurrence of cross-purpose, higher speed arterial facilities, which have proven be especially dangerous to Black, Indigenous, and Latino pedestrians and cyclists in suburban and urban areas of the United States (Schneider, 2020; Roll and McNeil, 2022; Barajas, 2018; Sanders, Schneider, and Proulx, 2022).
