Welcome to the website of Advancing Sustainable Safety!

Every year there are nearly 1,000 road deaths, and many tens of thousands are injured. Fortunately, these numbers are gradually but definitely getting lower. Dutch traffic is extremely safe, and when compared with other countries, it is one of the safest in the world. However, good as it may be, each year there still are too many traffic casualties. For every year a disaster happens which is not experienced as a disaster. Nor does society react as if it were a disaster. The average Dutchman just seems to shrug off all these anonymous deaths: road crashes are just part of everyday life. The chance of being killed in a road crash is too much an abstract idea to worry about. However, it's another matter if one of the deaths is a neighbour, a colleague at work, a good friend, or your own child. Only then are we amazed about how this could happen and do we ask how it could have been prevented. It is not surprising that the Dutch regard road safety as being of great personal, social, and political importance. But which are the next steps?

An accident can happen to everyone. Everybody sometimes makes an error at an unguarded moment; there are enough examples. Simply because people do make errors, and there's a greater chance of making fatal errors when they purposely violate traffic rules, it is extremely important that there are safety guarantees to counterbalance them. This is the Sustainable Safety approach in a nutshell.
The book entitled Advancing Sustainable Safety; National Road Safety Outlook for 2005-2020 is the follow-up to Towards a sustainably safe Road Traffic. Advancing Sustainable Safety critically examines the Sustainable Safety vision. Adaptations have been made where necessary because, over the years, we have learned since our initial steps on the way towards a sustainably safe road traffic. We have also updated this vision because of advancing insights and new developments. The book is not a policy memorandum. However, we do want the updated vision to inspire the policy agenda of all levels of government, the private sector, and civic society. Each chapter contains many recommendations and possible for future road safety policy.
With Advancing Sustainable Safety SWOV wants to give Sustainable Safety a fresh impulse.

I hope that the advanced vision will inspire you to further promote road safety in your country during the coming years.

 

Fred Wegman
Managing Director SWOV