No Accident: Eliminating Injury and Death on Canadian Roads

It is possible to eliminate death and serious injury from Canada’s roads. In other jurisdictions, the European Union, centres in the United States, and at least one automotive company aim to achieve comparable results as early as 2020. In Canada, though, citizens must turn their thinking on its head and make road safety a national priority.

Since the motor vehicle first went into mass production, the driver has taken most of the blame for its failures. In a world where each person’s safety is dependent on a system in which millions of drivers must drive perfectly over billions of hours behind the wheel, failure on a massive scale has been the result. When we neglect the central role of the motor vehicle as a dangerous consumer product, the result is one of the largest human-made means for physically assaulting human beings. It is time for Canadians to embrace internationally recognized ways of thinking and enter an era in which the motor vehicle by-product of human carnage is relegated to history.

No Accident examines problems related to road safety and makes recommendations for the way forward. Topics include types of drivers; human-related driving errors related to fatigue, speed, alcohol, and distraction and roads; pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit; road engineering; motor vehicle regulation; auto safety design; and collision-avoidance technologies such as radar and camera-based sensors on vehicles that prevent crashes. This multi-disciplinary study demystifies the world of road safety and provides a road map for the next twenty years.

Prologue

Neil Arason

The prologue introduces the reader to the problem of human trauma from road crashes and reveals why our thinking on the issue is now out of date.  It looks at what some other parts of the world are doing to eliminate deaths and injuries from traffic and how Canada could do the same.

Chapter 1

Neil Arason

There are only six types of drivers: young and new drivers, high-risk drivers, truck drivers, unfit drivers, motorcycle riders and the rest of us.  This chapter examines all six types as each contributes to the road injury and death problem in some way.

Chapter 2

Neil Arason

The essence of this chapter is the major human-related problems of driving like alcohol, drugs, distraction, speed and fatigue while investigating leading practices throughout the world that respond to these and other seemingly unsolvable driver problems. 

Chapter 3

Neil Arason

Children, pedestrians, cyclists and those who use public transport have been forgotten in the design of our cities.  This chapter makes a case to re-work urban order and shift it away from old style thinking and toward the road users of the new century.  

Chapter 4

Neil Arason

Going beneath the techno-speak of the engineering world, this chapter exposes what we can do to enable modern road engineering to play its part in safe road travel.  It looks at the principles of good road design and what all roads must function to do in easily understandable terms.

Chapter 5

Neil Arason

This chapter surveys regulation of the motor vehicle in North America across time, its delays and its triumphs.  The potential safety benefits of sound and innovative motor vehicle regulation are examined and are nothing short of colossal.

Chapter 6

Neil Arason

This chapter examines passive automobile safety features that have long been understood to reduce injuries to people when crashes occur including even those outside of motor vehicles.  The untapped potential of largely unregulated auto safety designs is examined. 

Chapter 7

Neil Arason

The focus of this chapter is on active safety or the use technology like cameras and radar to prevent crashes from happening.  This chapter takes the reader through some of the most promising collision avoidance technologies and the manner in which current regulation falls short. 

Chapter 8

Neil Arason

This concluding chapter summarizes many of the most significant principles put forth in the book, looks at how other countries view and manage road safety as a categorical issue, sets out an exact recipe for change and revisits the imperative to make road safety nothing less than a mainstream national priority.