A Strategic Approach to Transforming Traffic Safety Culture to Reduce Deaths and Injuries (2018)

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1 Summary Creating a positive traffic safety culture is integral to helping our nation move toward a vision of a highway system with no fatalities (TowardsZeroDeaths, 2012, p. 61). A key element of the Toward Zero Deaths (TZD) National Strategy on Highway Safety is the transformation of the traffic safety culture in the United States among all road users, including non-motorized users. This transformation would not only support road user decisions to behave safely, but would also increase their support for strategies that increase traffic safety. The purpose of this project is to provide state agencies responsible for traffic safety (and their traditional, as well as non-traditional, traffic safety partners) with guidance for a strategic approach to transform the traffic safety culture of road users and stakeholders. The goal is to use this approach to sustain improvements in traffic safety for all road users, including non-motorized users. Fundamental to this goal is the need to develop a standard operational definition of “traffic safety culture.” Arguably, the greatest challenge of defining traffic safety culture is being too inclusive about what culture includes. Therefore, if the goal is to change behavioral hazards affecting crash risk, the concept of traffic safety culture must be able to explain and predict these behaviors (and artifacts) rather than include them in its own definition. And so, for the purpose of this project, we assume “culture is in the mind of the people” (Geertz, 1973, p. 89). In this context, we propose to define traffic safety culture as the values and beliefs shared among groups of road users and stakeholders that influence their decisions to behave or act in ways that affect traffic safety. This definition includes the contribution of road user behaviors to fatal and serious injury traffic crashes as well as the contributions from all levels of the social environment such as organizations whose actions can impact traffic safety. Indeed, the role of traffic safety culture in determining stakeholder actions is a key concept for the strategic approach proposed in this report. Based on this definition, a traffic safety culture-based (TSCB) strategy is one that is intentionally designed to emphasize values and change beliefs within a specific social

2 group in order to change behaviors (and actions) that affect traffic safety. Such strategies can be effective in changing road user behavior. However, a strategic approach to transform traffic safety culture should leverage the values and change the beliefs of all relevant traffic safety stakeholders across the social environment (Nation et al., 2003). In this way, traffic safety culture is transformed across the entire social environment, not just within one road user group. As a result of this transformation, traffic safety is valued and pursued at every level of society (AAAFTS, 2012).