Dear Colleagues,

Sustainability provides an open academic space for scholars to publish high-quality articles to raise public awareness on important topics and their related issues, including sustainable transportation. In this Special Issue of Sustainability, we welcome submissions on the topic of “Sustainable Transport Safety” (STS), its historical roots, various manifestations in practice, successes to date, and emerging and related issues.

Historically, we know that Dr. Fred Wegman and his Dutch SWOV team laid the foundation for STS in their work on Sustainable Safety, wherein they began to look at the entire land use and transport system in the early 1990s, with their initial goal to reduce fatal crashes by 50%. They researched, not only the road environment, vehicle, and driver, but also the whole concept of separation by speed, mass, and direction, and, from a human-centric (versus traditional car-centric) approach. They built on earlier work by the UK’s Buchanan (1963) who recognized the significant impact that built-form (i.e., neighborhood design) has on road safety, and devised the five Dutch safe system principles of: Functionality, Homogeneity, Predictability, Forgivingness, and State Awareness. Among other things, this led to the Dutch national policy to reduce default speeds in neighborhoods to 30 km/h, recognizing the vulnerabilty of the human body to vehicle impacts, as well as protecting neighborhood cores from thru vehicle traffic, and hence, the concept of planning for improved road safety in new neighborhoods was birthed, commonly known as transport safety planning. The point being that a well-planned neighborhood can lead to a level of safety that can be sustained, or, a sustainably safe design. A great deal of subsequent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of this holistic Dutch approach.

Many others have followed suit to pursue similar sustainable safety improvements. Sweden was the first to coin the phrase ‘Vision Zero’, a lofty goal going beyond Holland’s 50% target. On the premise that even one fatal injury was too many, Sweden pursued a national program to replace all traffic signals with roundabouts, and realized almost overnight a 50% reduction in fatal traffic crashes. North American governments were also following suit with ‘Safety Conscious Planning’ and more recently their own version of vision zero, but with less immediate results, for various reasons that is a topic worthy of further discussion in this special issue. Most recently, the UN and its World Health Organization have declared injury and death due to traffic crashes as a global epidemic that claims over 1.3 million lives, and up to 5% of national GDP each year. Successive decades of action have been aiming to reduce this enormously sad loss of life and its associated economic burdens. Progress is being made, slowly, but much more remains to be done.

Of course, any discussion of road safety planning, and as we will call it in this Special Issue, sustainable transport safety (STS), is complex and multi-faceted. Its concept and the approach to effective STS implementation requires virtually all research fields as critical success factors—a system approach. It requires community planners to design for a desired quality of life that can be sustained in accordance with UN Sustainable Development Goals, including traffic safety. Research is needed to develop easy to use and reliable empirical tools to allow these same community planners to compare and refine their neighborhoods for long term, sustainable safety benefits. Psychologists, such as those at SWOV that researched, created and implemented the Dutch Sustainable Road Safety program, are needed to research human factors in each transport mode, its relationship to built environment, and how emerging modes (e-bikes, AVs) could be an effective, but still sustainably safe, part of the land use/transport system. Moreover, we need to better understand what messages various built-forms give to various users, and how to then better design for self-educating/self-enforcing safer use of those transport systems. Public Health researchers are needed to provide critical information on health outcomes, on traffic exposures, and access to data on the critically vital statistics regarding non-vehicular transport modes, typically the most vulnerable and hardest to document, pedestrians and bicyclists—our vulnerable road users (VRU). Low/Middle Income countries are where 80% of VRU fatalities occur. In North America, while vehicular fatalies are on the decline, VRU fatalities are still rising. Clearly, the North American vision zero approach needs help, as do road safety teams in developing countries.

Using traditional approaches to education, enforcement and/or engineerig road safety improvement are not working. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Perhaps we can learn from the Australians and their automated enforcement programs, a bold and at times controversial approach that not only worked, but worked so well that hospital wards were closed and significant health budget savings occurred. Strong leadership is needed, as well as transport economic research, to expand our horizons and discuss on how best to invest our ever scarcer tax dollars in human, civil, and technological infrastructure, among others, to break through the plateau and achieve global WHO and zero vision goals.

How can we reduce traffic fatalities in the face of strong political lobbying by traditional auto and oil industries that seek to sell more cars, build more roads, and encourage more and longer trips, with their associated economic benefits and spin-offs? We need to research interactions in this system approach, about climate change impacts of continuing to drive and burn fossil fuels, so we need environmental researchers to contribute to this discussion. And is it an ‘us versus them’ discussion, must car manufacturers and oil producers lose in order for lives to be saved, to preclude more traffic fatalities? We need business case research to help us find a way that works for all stakeholders, that finds economically feasible solutions while we transition to sustainably safer communities, that empower our decision-makers, our leaders to act on our behalf, to facilitate Sustainable Transport Safety. Will you help to contribute to this most important discussion and move us forward toward increased sustainable transport safety for all?

Prof. Dr. Gord Lovegrove
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Strategic community planning
• Safe system design
• Transport economics
• Sustainable transport safety
• Road safety planning
• Vision Zero
• Sustainable development
• UN Sustainable development goals