Press release

3 November 2006

Sustainable Safety, the vision that has been an important basis for the successful Dutch road safety policy since 1992, has been updated and published under the title Advancing Sustainable Safety. This update is now integrally available in an English edition. On 3rd November the Dutch Minister of
Transport Karla Peijs presented the first copies to her European colleagues at the EU Road Safety Conference in Verona, Italy. With this publication, SWOV wants to inspire the international road safety professionals with
examples of how they too can improve road safety in their countries.

The roads in the Netherlands are among the safest in the world. Since mid 1990's the principles of the
Sustainable Safety vision have been applied to road traffic in the Netherlands on a large scale.
In spite of this top position, SWOV is of the opinion that much can still be done to make traffic even safer.
Advancing Sustainable Safety provides ideas for successful future interventions.

Advancing Sustainable Safety: five principles
The objective of Sustainable Safety is to prevent road crashes from happening, and where this is not feasible, to reduce the incidence of (severe) injuries whenever possible. This can be achieved by a proactive and integral approach in which human characteristics are used as the point of departure: a user-oriented system approach.
The following five principles are its basis:

• Functionality of roads
• Homogeneity of masses and/or speed and direction
• Recognizability of the of the road design and predictability of road course and road user behaviour
• Forgivingness of the surroundings and between road users
• State awareness of the road user
  

The name Sustainable Safety is inspired by the UN Brundtland Commission on sustainable development: no longer do we wish to hand over a road traffic system to the next generation in which we tolerate that road transport inevitably lead to a the epidemic of road deaths and injuries, as can be observed today.

Measures and policy
As well as being a road safety vision, with Advancing Sustainable Safety SWOV also provides leads for
concrete road safety measures and road safety policies for the coming 10-15 years.

An important aspect of a successful road safety policy is the close cooperation between government, civil society, and the private sector, such as vehicle manufacturers and ITS developers. Cooperation and mutual rapport should lead to unambiguous and uniform road safety measures.
SWOV strongly supports the imbedding of the Sustainable Safety vision in all areas of traffic policy such as
mobility and infrastructure and, moreover, to actually implement it at all tiers of government.

A coordinating quality assurance system for road safety such as already exists in air and railway traffic, industry, and health care etc., should also be introduced. Such a system could, for example, set expertise demands for personnel, procedures for planning preparation and implementation, and guidelines for road design and accident analyses.

In order to make Advancing Sustainable Safety available worldwide, SWOV has created a special website:
www.sustainablesafety.nl. This complete publication as well as a summary can be consulted at this website
free of charge. Printed copies of the book and summary can also be ordered.

To the press release in pdf