Road Safety In Canada

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.

IntroductIon 1.1 purpose The purpose of this booklet is to provide information to road safety professionals to assist them in their efforts to promote road safety and to encourage the commitment of all Canadians to rethink road safety and to adopt safer behaviour. [...] The year includes the launch of the RSS 2015 and the United Nations' Decade of Action, the Canadian Multidisciplinary Road Safety Conference, and the 4th annual National Day of Remembrance for Road Crash Victims in November, as well as jurisdictionally and organizationally specific programs. [...] The UN General Assembly passed a resolution in March 2010 to establish the Decade of Action for Road Safety led by the World Health Organization (WHO) in order to "stabilize and then reduce the forecasted level of road traffic fatalities around the world by increasing activities conducted at national, regional and global levels." The principles guiding the Decade of Action are to adopt a "Safe Sys [...] The annual social costs of the motor vehicle collisions in terms of loss of life, medical treatment, rehabilitation, lost productivity, and property damage are measured in tens of billions of dollars. [...] Many vehicles are also equipped with seat belt pretensioners, which automatically remove the slack in the belt at the time of impact, and load limiters, which allow the belt to spool out so that the occupants can ride down the impact without being injured by the belt itself.

The Canadian Guide to In-service Road Safety Reviews is a practical guide for conducting reviews on existing roads, based on the current experience and expertise in Canada and internationally. A companion guide to TAC's Canadian Road Safety Audit Guide, this publication provides guidelines to traffic practitioners on how to upgrade the operational and physical characteristics of existing in-service roads to be more compatible with current traffic conditions and safety knowledge.

This book provides traffic safety researchers and practitioners with an international and multi-disciplinary compendium of theoretical and methodological concepts relevant to the research and application of Traffic Safety Culture aiming towards a vision of zero traffic fatalities.