Roadsafety:defeat,complicityandthe Bankruptcyofscience

Road traffic accidents (RTA’s) continue to be a serious problem. The paper argues that much research and effort to minimise this problem is locked into a fundamental misconception in so far as it assumes that blame, responsibility or engineering inadequacies can explain RTA’s. The whole system of motorised transport, mobility patterns, land uses, governmental intervention and large company support has deprived society of realistic alternatives to the motor car and bequeathed a delicient technology with several societal disbenefits. Long term solutions to the problem of RTA’s involve basic change to this systems design. Anything less will continue to reinforce the present trajectory. Road safety as an important area for research and action programmes has received a great deal of scientific attention in recent years. Progress has been made on several different fronts but in one area there would appear to be a serious lack of interest or, at the very least, a paucity of published information and informed debate. This area concerns the degree to which our thinking and hence our solutions are locked into a particular view of technology and society and thereby condemned to produce incremental improvements but no radical alteration in the magnitude or structure of the problem itself. In the case of road safety it can be argued that solutions which build on the acceptance of lfie motor car as a major and immutable technology will reinforce that position and generate a primary paradox: solutions designed to reduce a major negative effect of motorised transport contribute to the perpetuation of the circumstances which lead to road traffic accidents. The lack of policy suggestions outside of this “predominant technology” framework leads to great confusion in road traffic accident research. There is confusion about objectives, especially when these relate to the straightforward reduction of accident occurrences but conflict with resource constraints or with the interests of car users themselves who in many different ways have the power to nullify policies which appear to reduce the advantages or convenience of the privately owned motor car. Problems of conflict between interest groups and the scientific “urge” to provide objective, technical explanations for complex problems are sources of confusion in road traffic accident research and a proper understanding of the nature of the problem itself. In the U.K., the 1967 Road Safety Paper-A Fresh Approach [Cmnd 33391 identified people, vehicles and roads as the key dimensions of road safety policy and this rough categorisation has served to differentiate between major areas of research and professional responsibility. This in itself is a source of some of the difficulty surrounding road traffic accident research. The progress which has been made in areas as diverse as road pavement design, vehicle engineering and studies of driver/pedestrian behaviour has not been matched by advances in our understanding of the role and function of the transport system as a whole and of the needs and susceptibilities of different groups and individuals for whom movement in cities and elsewhere is an integral part of normal existence. Road safety hazards which may in some matter of detail be well understood (though remedial action may not be forthcoming) are not understood at all well as part of a general malaise which renders daily activity patterns more troublesome and difficult for many groups in scattered locations. It is of little value to point to the advantages of motorised transport in terms which are sometimes held to explain or excuse some of the disadvantages because there is no adequate mechanism for ensuring a fair distribution of benefits and disbenefits in society. The road traffic accident is a disbenefit (which has been given a monetary value) whose distribution vis a vis the distribution of benefits is simply not known. The accelerated development of detailed research (e.g. on the psychological attributes of