By SARAH GOODYEAR, City Lab
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\nIt\u2019s a radical vision that has made Sweden an international leader in the area of road safety. When Vision Zero first launched, Sweden recorded seven traffic fatalities per 100,000 people; today, despite a significant increase in traffic volume, that number is fewer than three. To compare, the number of road fatalities in the United States is 11.6 per 100,000.
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\nFor them it is very difficult to buy into \u201czero.\u201d Because in their economic models, you have costs and benefits, and although they might not say it explicitly, the idea is that there is an optimum number of fatalities.
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\nThere\u2019s a kind of paradox. I lived in Melbourne, Australia, in 2006. I remember I went to the library there, and I found a book that an American author had written about Sweden. And that guy, he was a little bit frustrated. He saw all these systems that we have in our society, for example when it comes to health care and social security and so on, it seems he was against these. There was some sense that if you take care too much about people in your society they will be a little bit spoiled, or whatever. That you have to fight.
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\nIf we can create a system where people are safe, why shouldn\u2019t we? Why should we put the whole responsibility on the individual road user, when we know they will talk on their phones, they will do lots of things that we might not be happy about? So let\u2019s try to build a more human-friendly system instead. And we have the knowledge to do that.
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\nAnd we have increased the compliance on these roads from 50 to more than 80 or 90 percent. And we don\u2019t catch any people at all. We reduce the speed, but we don\u2019t catch people. And we don\u2019t earn any money. It\u2019s an investment for us. We don\u2019t want to get that discussion in our society that this is a revenue-raising thing. We want people to understand that this is for safety. So we nudge people to do the right thing.
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\nSo it\u2019s not a war between unprotected road user and protected road user. Here we need to have a more holistic perspective. Where we need cars because they are good for society, we should use them. But in places where we don\u2019t need them, we shouldn\u2019t use them as much as we do.
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\nhttps:\/\/www.citylab.com\/commute\/2014\/11\/the-swedish-approach-to-road-safety-the-accident-is-not-the-major-problem\/382995\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By SARAH GOODYEAR, City Lab … It\u2019s a radical vision that has made Sweden an international leader in the area of road safety. When Vision Zero first launched, Sweden recorded seven traffic fatalities per 100,000 people; today, despite a significant increase in traffic volume, that number is fewer than three. To compare, the number of … <\/p>\n