Sustainable Mobility through Safer Roads: Translating Road Safety Strategy into Local Context in Western Australia

Road safety is an ongoing challenge to sustainable mobility and transportation. The target set by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) suggests reframing the issue with a broader outlook and pragmatic system. Unlike previous road safety strategies and models that favour engineering solutions and legal instruments, there is an increasing need to consider local context and complexities. While such principles have been increasingly featured in higher-level policy frameworks in national or state-level strategies (e.g., Safe System or Vision Zero approach), an effort to translate them into implementable actions for local development areas is absent. To address this gap, this study aims to develop a conceptual framework to examine the nature and extent to which statewide principles are translated into local government policies. We outline a 4C Framework (consisting of clarity, capability, changing context, and community engagement) to evaluate local policy integration in Perth, Western Australia. A five-point indicative scale is applied to evaluate the selected policy instruments against this framework. The results show that only a little over a quarter (27%) demonstrated a highly satisfactory performance in capturing higher-level policy objectives. The low-scoring councils failed to demonstrate the ability to consider future changes and inclusive road design. Councils along the periphery having new residential development showed comparatively greater success in translating overarching strategies. Regional cooperation has been very effective in enabling local agencies to adopt a more sustainable pathway to road safety measures. The criteria proposed within the framework will play a pivotal role in effective policy integration and to achieve more context-sensitive outcomes that are beyond the scope of modern road safety strategies.