ABSTRACT
Assistant Professor, International Health, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health,
Baltimore, MD, USA
Volvo Chair Professor Emeritus, Transportation Research & Injury Prevention Programme,
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India
The road safety performance of economically developed OECD countries over the last century shows a remarkable and consistent pattern. In most of these countries, road traffic deaths were rising until the 1960s but have declined steadily since then. Understanding the road safety history of OECD countries can provide useful insights to road safety professionals in low-and middleincome countries (LMICs) to help them better manage safety in their transportation systems. This chapter examines the trends in performance of OECD countries through three perspectives. The first considers the rising and falling trends in road traffic deaths as a natural developmental process (“economic determinism”). In this perspective, road traffic injuries increase initially as a society motorizes but injuries begin to decline after the society reaches a certain developmental threshold, after which it begins to address its health and environmental issues. The second perspective critiques this position by illustrating that the rising and falling trends can partly be explained by the shift in risk that occurs when motorization is primarily through increasing caruse. As the use of cars increases, the risk to pedestrians initially increases. However, eventually most pedestrians become car users and further motorization reduces the number of pedestrians
and
and hence their exposure to road traffic injuries. In the final perspective, we look at the issue through the lens of a political process. We reassess the statistical data to show that the late 1960s were a special moment in history when the OECD countries that were at substantially different income levels acted together to regulate transport risk by establishing and funding national road safety agencies. Over the following decades, these institutions were able to implement large-scale national road safety programs that have had a remarkable effect on reducing the road death toll. The main implication of this perspective for LMICs is that countries do not need to wait to be richer to address road safety. Instead, they should act now to establish national institutions with the mandate and resources to regulate and manage road safety in their transportation system.
Key Words: Road Safety Performance; OECD countries; Kuznets hypothesis
