Ultimate Safe System for Smart City Roads

The World’s Health Organisation estimates that there are 50 million injuries and 1.35 million deaths caused by road accidents every year. The Safe System is a widely used concept for road transport systems that put forward the reduction of the injuries and deaths of road accidents as its safety goal. However, Job et al. (2022) considers this system unreliable as it very often still puts the responsibility of safety on the road users. When accidents happen, fallibility and negligence of the users are usually blamed as the cause of the accidents, instead of shared responsibility between road owner, designer and manager that The Safe System introduces. 

The Ultimate Safe System then tries to shift this “victim blaming” tendency and restore the “shared responsibility” pillar in the system. This concept highlights the importance of infrastructure safety, and that a great road network cannot be killed or seriously injured regardless of their behavior or the behavior of other road users. Thus road network should be design and operated where there are limited to no exposure to hazard of safety, for example:

• Road and vehicle features that are maintained, reliable, effective, and can prevent deaths and serious injuries without being reliant on road user behaviour and compliance with laws. 
• Setting and achieving compliance with speed limits required to deliver ultimate safety through vehicle engineering (such as speed limiting, intelligent speed adaptation) without relying on drivers to choose to comply with limits

This study also emphasis that road safety is an ambitious long-term mission, which means clear measure and implementation is not only required in the start of the initiatives but also coupled with  interim interventions that deliver road safety act as necessary interventions to build an Ultimate Safe System implemented over time.

Reference:

Job, R. S., Truong, J., & Sakashita, C. (2022). The Ultimate Safe System: Redefining the Safe System Approach for Road Safety. Sustainability, 14(5), 2978.

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