Accident Analysis and Prevention 145 (2020) 105663
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Accident Analysis and Prevention
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aap
From Research to Practice – An Introduction to the Special Issue
1,⁎
Ezra Hauer
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2
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, Paul Jovanis
T
University of Toronto, Canada
Penn State University, United States
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice
there is.” Yogi Berra
The role of research on road safety is to produce trustworthy information which, if used, makes for better practice – better policy
making, regulation, planning, road design, and traffic management. But
what if the information produced is not trustworthy, what if credible
findings are not used? Do we have a problem? What can be done about
it? These are some of the questions raised in the lead paper (Hauer,
2019a).
We thought that the relationship between road safety research and
practice should be discussed from a variety of perspectives and this led
to the idea of a special issue. It is our hope that the reader will find the
contributions illuminating, that they will stimulate thought, discussion
and, perhaps, engender reform.
Practice is the making of decisions and decisions require the exercise of judgment. Inasmuch as these decisions influence the frequency
and severity of crashes one would like this judgment to be informed by
an evidence-based anticipation of their likely safety consequences; one
would to like to have confidence that, in their judgment, professionals
know how to balance safety against cost and mobility; that they know
how, as is required, to make road safety paramount. Hauer (2019b)
argues that neither the training nor the experience of transportation
engineers endow them with the requisite knowledge and ability.
One of the difficulties in the exercise of judgment are the complexities of behavioral adaptation. What is known about it? When can
we anticipate the safety effect of interventions and when not? Smiley
and Rudin-Brown (2020) document the ubiquitous nature of behavioral
adaptation and describe how drivers change the way they drive in response to various interventions. Their goal is to lay out the breadth of
situations in which behavioral adaptation can be expected to occur, to
describe the (generally) unintended changes that occur in various aspects of driver performance, and to identify countermeasure characteristics that are likely to lead to adaptive behavior.
Another difficulty is the need to trade road user safety against cost,
time and other consequences. Elvik (2019) argues, realistically, that
ideals like Vision Zero or Sustainable Safety are inspirational ideas, not
tools for policy analysis, that the making trade-offs is unavoidable. Can
cost-benefit analysis guide us to get the balance right? On this, after a
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Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ezra.hauer@utoronto.ca (E. Hauer).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2020.105663
Available online 31 August 2020
0001-4575/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
thorough discussion of its conceptual foundations and main assumptions Elvik concludes that “cost-benefit analysis cannot answer the main
questions it was designed to answer”. If so, what can? There are other
formal tools of policy analysis (e.g. Multicriterion Analysis) but these
seem to suffer from similar ignominies. Perhaps more promising are
attempts to state all impacts of road safety measures in terms of changes
in human longevity and health.
The ethical dimensions of engineering roads and traffic are the
subject of Pritchard’s (2019) paper. For the philosopher the question is
not only one of quantification (how many lives and injuries, how many
dollars, how much time will be lost, etc.) nor of trade-off (how many
hours of delay for one life, etc.). The question is also what are the engineer’s responsibilities, how to live up to the first canon of the engineer’s code of ethics (to hold safety paramount), what about the
feeling of security, or, generally, which consequences need to be considered, why does the passage of time matter, how to recognize the
limitations of one’s own profession and what does that mean for the
need to partner with other professions? The questions are posed and
illustrated by down-to-earth examples.
Ethics are also the subject of the paper by Haghighattalab et al.
(2019). After an extensive review the authors conclude that absence of
ethical considerations is a gap in the crash analysis models. The authors
suggest that ethical control be implemented at three levels: comprehensive policymaking, systematic decision-making, and individual
employee performance.
Mohan (2019) elevates the question of the professional’s responsibility to a higher level. He tackles the broader topic of rights and obligations and begins by telling three commonplace stories. An elderly
gentlemen in India was dragged to his death by a bus; this would not
have happened if buses could not move when the door is open. A
middle-aged woman in Sweden lost control driving at 170 km/h; she
would live if cars could not be driven that fast. A young lady in Uganda
was disabled when her moped crashed; she might not be disabled if
motorcycle helmet wearing was obligatory. The morals are two. First,
that these stories are commonplace should give one pause. Carnage is
tolerated in road transport but is not acceptable when we use other
man-made products. Second, that such death and injuries are hardly
‘unintentional’ for they could be prevented. That they were not is the
result of intent. And so the question is whether road users have the right
Accident Analysis and Prevention 145 (2020) 105663
E. Hauer and P. Jovanis
to expect the missing prevention and, if so, on whose shoulder rests the
obligation to provide it. For, as Mohan shows, solemn words and declarations of right do little if not accompanied by the recognition of
obligations; that “at the operational level it is the ‘State’ which has the
primary obligation for ensuring the people’s right to road safety.” But,
as the lead paper shows, the ‘State’ has interests of its own (budget,
publicity, politics) of which the transportation professional in it employ
is cognizant when making decisions that affect road user safety.
Effective prevention rests on knowledge of causes. The link between
crash causes, countermeasures and safety policies is the subject of
Shinar’s (2019) contribution. Crash causation studies, and there are
many, all tend to conclude that humans and their failures are the cause
of 90%-95% of crashes. Is that so? Not necessarily say Shinar. All these
studies share on one critical and invalid assumption: the assumption
that cause is some kind of error or failure, a deviation from what is
considered ‘normal'. But ‘normalcy’ is a fluid concept. Am I ‘distracted’
when I drive and listen to the radio, when I speak to the passenger,
when I think about something? Are roads designed to current practice
and traffic controls that are in accord with some manual never causes?
In examining the link between cause and countermeasure Shinar notes
that crashes are not like infectious diseases, where identifying the
bacterium or virus is essential for finding prevention measures; that in
crash prevention a more fruitful approach is to use causes as clues to
environmental or vehicular changes that would eliminate this 'cause',
'kill its breeding ground' so to speak. In his opinion a “more balanced
approach to the definition of a cause and to the search for crash
countermeasures is needed, and the safe system approach appears to be
a most promising one.”
One of the environmental causes that Shinar mentions are roads,
how they are designed and built. Roads are built to conform to design
guidelines. Van Beinum and Wegman (2019) note that during the latest
revision of the Dutch motorway design guidelines it became clear that
an evidence based-justification for the prescribed ramp spacing and
length of weaving segments on Dutch motorways is missing. Data were
collected at several on-ramps, off ramps, and weaving segments. The
results show that the areas around ramps that are influenced by turbulence are smaller than specified in design manuals.
Special journal issues are peculiar creatures. They are both satisfying and disappointing. It is great to have prominent thinkers illumine a subject matter from several perspectives. And yet, much is left in
the shadow. Let’s continue and make the research-practice relationship
into a well function partnership.
References
Hauer, E., 2019a. On the relationship between road safety research and the practice of
road design and operation. Accident Analysis and Prevention 128, 114–131.
Hauer, W., 2019b. Engineering judgment and road safety. Accident Analysis and
Prevention 129, 180–189.
Mohan, D, 2019. Traffic safety: Rights and obligations. Accident Analysis and Prevention
128, 159–163.
Pritchard, MS, 2019. Safety, security, and serviceability in road engineering. Accident
Analysis and Prevention 127, 172–176.
Haghighattalab, S., Chen, A, Fan, Y, Mohammadi, R, 2019. Engineering ethics within
accident analysis models. Accident Analysis and Prevention 129, 119–125.
Shinar, D, 2019. Crash causes, countermeasures, and safety policy implications. Accident
Analysis and Prevention 125, 224–231.
Elvik, R., 2019. How to trade safety against cost, time and other impacts of road safety
measures. Accident Analysis and Prevention 127, 150–155.
Smiley, A., Rudin-Brown, C, 2020. Drivers adapt – Be prepared for It!. Accident Analysis
and Prevention 135, 105370.
Van Beinum, A., Wegman, F, 2019. Design guidelines for turbulence in traffic on Dutch
motorways. Accident Analysis and Prevention 132, 10528.
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