A review of safety culture theory and its potential application to traffic safety

Over the past several years, organizations in high-risk industries such as nuclear power and aviation have become increasingly aware of the role that safety culture plays in shaping reliable and safe operations. As a result, safety professionals working in other industries and transportation modalities such as manufacturing, construction, chemical and petroleum processing, and traffic safety have also begun contemplating the role that safety culture might play in mitigating risk within these settings. The purpose of the present chapter, therefore, is to (1) briefly review and synthesize previous safety culture literature, (2) discuss the challenges of moving beyond safety culture as simply an intuitive explanation of accidents to actual measurement and change, and (3) analyze the similarities and differences between traffic-safety systems and other high-risk industries that may impact the applicability of the safety-culture concept across these domains. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research on the topic of safety culture as applied to traffic safety.