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January 2010
Toward Zero Deaths Conference explores traffic safety culture, ideas for change
James Hedlund
Driver distraction has come to the top of the transportation safety agenda, as more and more states are considering banning text messaging or cell phone use while driving. At this year’s Toward Zero Deaths (TZD) Conference, Jim Hedlund, a consultant with Highway Safety North, discussed the distracted driving pandemic in terms of “traffic safety culture” and offered thoughts on why driver behaviors and attitudes need to change.
The TZD annual conference serves as a forum for sharing information on how to reduce the number of fatalities and injuries on Minnesota roads. This year’s event, held October 28 and 29 in Duluth, Minnesota, drew over 600 attendees.
In 2006, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety commissioned Hedlund to synthesize several research articles addressing safety culture from the diverse perspectives of more than 20 top researchers from fields including public health, public policy, social psychology, and civil engineering.
The key characteristics of culture as it relates to traffic safety in the United States are complacency and indifference, Hedlund said. “As a nation, we accept more than 40,000 traffic fatalities and 2.5 million injuries each year. Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for children, adolescents, and young adults in the United States, but they are not seen as a major public health problem.”
According to Hedlund, national, state, and local governments themselves can get in the way of changing traffic safety culture primarily because such a change isn’t a priority. Scarce resources and questions about the government’s role versus individual control are obstacles as well.
It has been possible to change traffic safety culture, he said, such as in the case of child passenger safety seats, which are now universal. “In order to work toward changing these issues, we need a vision of what the traffic safety culture should be. In the United States, our vision is to have fewer than 30,000 fatalities per year by 2011,” Hedlund said. Individuals need to influence others in their workplace and personal life and learn from experience. “Look at examples of what cultures have changed and what the change agents were: can strategies used there be adapted elsewhere?”
Max Donath
Keith Knapp
John Adams
Lee Munnich
Several University of Minnesota researchers presented at the conference. In a concurrent session on improving intersection safety through technology, Professor Max Donath, director of the ITS Institute at CTS, talked about research to help drivers better gage gap intervals and timing at intersections. For example, technologies such as site sensors and dynamic sign information can be used to warn drivers when it’s unsafe to enter an intersection from a secondary road.
A panel discussion on speed featured Keith Knapp, director of transportation safety engineering for the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety (CERS), and Professor John Adams of the Department of Geography. Knapp discussed some effective speed reduction techniques for rural areas, including roundabouts, median islands, gateways, lighting, transverse markings, and color speed limit signs.
Adams provided an overview of his recent research (published by CTS) on automated enforcement and red-light running. Automated speed enforcement techniques include radar guns, laser devices that can pinpoint specific cars, recorders, cameras, and aerial speed measurement, among others. “Automated law enforcement is a touchy issue; both speed variation and speed itself are problems—there is a percentage of drivers who will always exceed the speed limit,” Adams said.
Adams said public education and other enforcement should be used to change driver behavior. “Adjusting speed limits has little effect on speed, which means that drivers tend to drive at a speed they’re comfortable with despite posted limits,” he said.
In a session on low-cost traffic safety improvements, Knapp reported preliminary findings from a study of centerline rumble strips. An implementation guide will be published at www.ruralsafety.umn.edu and will include final statistics. The overall conclusion of the study, he said, is “Rumble strips work.”
Lee Munnich, director of CERS, discussed ideas for public policy efforts to address rural transportation safety. He said that the current Rural Safety Policy Improvements Index project is investigating, identifying, and quantifying the direct impacts to rural safety of changes in policy-based measures such as seat belt laws and sobriety checkpoints.
Toward Zero Deaths is a Minnesota partnership led by the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Health, in cooperation with the Minnesota State Patrol, the Federal Highway Administration, Minnesota county engineers, and CTS. The conference was hosted by CTS and sponsored by Mn/DOT, the Department of Public Safety, and the Minnesota TZD program.
A proceedings of the conference will be published in early 2010. To receive a copy, call CTS at 612-626-1077 or visit www.cts.umn.edu/publications. CTS