Applying the Safe System Approach to Transportation Planning, Design, and Operations (2025)
Chapter: Practitioner Survey
Practitioner Survey
The purpose of the practitioner survey was to discern how transportation professionals and their partners in public health, emergency management, policy, research, and advocacy appraise various safety practices. The practices have been documented to empirically or theoretically impart safety benefits and are either widely or seldom applied in the US cultural context today.
Additional objectives of the survey were to assess respondents’ organizational climates, especially their innovativeness—or openness to changing policies and procedures—and their degree of individualism and fatalism. Prior work illustrates how organizational innovativeness often predicts technology adoption (Gokçearslan et al., 2017) and the implementation of novel procedures and practices (Aldahdouh et al., 2019). Anthropological studies demonstrate how individualism and fatalism are two of the most persistent cultural mindsets, which can stymie necessary change (Frameworks Institute, 2020).
Together, the complementary survey’s purpose and objectives lend the research team a clear sense of the professionals’ perspectives on safety practices across a range of domains, while grounding these perspectives in respondents’ organizational milieux and broader professional networks. In essence, survey results allow the team and project panel to better understand where the next logical step toward implementing a truly Safe System lies, considering the degree of organizational support professionals possess to adopt new, impactful safety practices and policies, and the resources available to overcome barriers to greatly reduce the epidemic of road trauma in the United States.
