The History of Traffic Safety: Describing 100 Years

We need ways to express the history of traffic safety. The death of 100 million people (and counting) through a completely manmade system must be explained from different angles. The historical perspective is necessary to help the traffic safety community avoid repeating and continuing this human catastrophe. Of course it was never the intention that a transport system would have such consequences. Sadly, it became accepted that the loss of human life was a routine part of this complex enterprise. Of course this assumption is false. History can help to explain the tragedy in a scientific form, without blaming or demonizing those involved in the process who tried different cures they no doubt believed in.

Many of us who work in policymaking to improve traffic safety have recognized that newcomers, like newly elected transport ministers and their teams, have good intentions but an amateur’s knowledge of how to improve traffic safety. Education and information, which are often useless, are usually the first tools that are applied, sometimes followed by enforcement. Historical reflections on traffic safety might help inspire effective solutions from the beginning.

Peter Norton’s “four paradigms” are a meaningful attempt to describe the approaches to auto safety over the last 100 years. At first it might seem strange that it is possible to present such a long process with just four headings, but his analysis is sharp and insightful. There is little doubt that there was a dramatic shift from seeing the automobile as a potentially dangerous machine to viewing it as one controllable by sensible and responsible individuals. For many this probably marks the beginning of the catastrophe. Imagine what might have happened if the car industry and infrastructure providers at that moment had taken on the responsibility for automobile safety. History would have looked very different.

Nicholas Oddy’s article on signage is the perfect first example of the amateur’s attempt at prevention, an impulse still strong today. It demonstrates Norton’s first and second paradigms, offering a good example of how responsibility moved from the provider to the user. Massimo Moraglio takes us even further into the period of handing over responsibility to the individual user, resulting in the widely held idea that bicycles and cars in themselves can be considered safe.

In Donald Weber’s wonderful article about the formation of crash statistics, it becomes even clearer that from the 1920s to 1940s, there was a question of dividing the blame, assigning it first to motorists and later to other road users like pedestrians. Weber writes: “The Touring Club’s approach was intended to allow motorists to avoid, or at least to share, the blame for the numerous traffic accidents.” As we learned later, in both aviation and road traffic safety the “blame game” is one of the major obstacles to effective prevention. It biases information, hides higher-degree prevention initiatives, and draws attention away from the fact that these problems are partly a result of how we as a society organize traffic safety to limit the responsibility for those designing and operating the road transport system. Most importantly, it discourages the development of other solutions such as new road or vehicle design.

Stève Bernardin’s “Taking the Problem to the People” is a great example of what happens when a paradigm gets tied up with politics and elaborated through lobbying and professional marketing methods. While we still do not have to question their intentions, it is clear that the car industry lobby was getting more nervous about the continuously increasing number of deaths and the counterforces that sooner or later would gain momentum. And as we all know, they did!

Jameson Wetmore insightfully describes what was really a paradigm shift from “blaming the victim” to “designing the driver out of the problem,” a very quick change of view that turned everything upside down. The problem was not the automotive industry, however. The problem was that the providers of the road infrastructure never understood that the advocates of crashworthiness meant a crashworthy system, not simply crash-worthy cars and restraints. Unfortunately the highway agencies and the urban...