🤔 5 Fatal Flaws in How We Think About Transport Safety


June 12th, 2025

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5 Fatal Flaws in How We Think About Transport Safety

Key Takeaways

The Problems:

  • Modal silos prevent us from investing in the safest transport options and create missed opportunities for modal shift
  • Speed obsession on urban roads prioritises travel time savings over safety, liveability, and encouraging active transport
  • Gold-plated infrastructure wastes resources that could deliver better safety outcomes elsewhere in the system
  • Car-centric safety thinking ignores the growing danger that larger, heavier vehicles pose to everyone outside them
  • Cultural tolerance for dangerous driving makes it difficult for politicians to implement necessary safety measures

The Solutions:

  • System-wide prioritisation of safety investments based on cost-benefit analysis across all transport modes
  • Integrated strategies that reduce car dependency while increasing public transport, walking, and cycling
  • Place-focused frameworks that deprioritise travel time savings on urban roads in favour of 20mph (30km/h) speed limits
  • Holistic car safety that considers impacts on pedestrians and cyclists, not just vehicle occupants
  • Cultural change through education and enforcement to make dangerous driving socially unacceptable

What Next?

Which of these problems is your jurisdiction afflicted by? Which solution can you begin to implement?

Introduction

Transport is full of safety tropes: “Safety is a non-negotiable”, “Vision Zero”, “Safety first”, etc.

Given all of these slogans and the emphasis on safety, surely we have our transport houses in order when it comes to safety? Sadly, we are not even close.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), nearly 1.2 million people die on roads around the world every year.

The unfortunate truth is that many of our safety problems stem from the way we think about and undertake safety investments in transport. We need to do better.

So, when it comes to safety, where are we going wrong?

What We Are Getting Wrong on Safety

Here are five problems in transport that are compromising better safety outcomes.

Problem 1 - We think about transport system safety in modal silos.

Transport agencies allocate safety budgets within modal silos, treating bus safety, rail safety, and road safety as separate problems. This ignores the fundamental reality that different modes have vastly different safety profiles. Rail is 10-20 times safer than cars, and buses are 6-7 times safer.

The result? We spend money making already relatively safe modes safer, while neglecting investments that could reduce the dangers posed by private vehicles. We compound this mistake by ignoring within our safety strategies, a key aspect that would align our safety strategy with our transport strategies: encouraging mode shift to reduce the use of motor vehicles.

Problem 2 - We rely on an outdated paradigm for speed on urban roads.

Urban road design still largely operates under the outdated assumption that faster vehicle movement equals better outcomes. This speed-first mentality produces roads that are hostile to walking and cycling, forcing more people into cars and creating the very congestion these roads were supposed to solve.

The obsession with travel time savings also ignores mounting evidence that higher urban speeds deliver negligible time benefits.

In some jurisdictions, there is a movement towards 20mph (30km/h) on at least some residential roads, and some jurisdictions are even making it the default speed limit. However, in most places, we still have a long way to go to change our thinking.

Problem 3 - Gold-plated infrastructure.

“We had bus shelters designed to basically get hit — literally, part of the idea was if they get hit by a huge truck, they could survive. We were spending like 8x more to build a bus shelter.

My whole thought is, well, if it gets hit, which we only have a few a year, just put a new one up. We’re building a bus shelter to be good for like 50 years. But the cost difference of just doing one and then replacing a couple times took us from like $400-and-some-thousand dollars for a bus shelter to like $80 thousand.”

This quote on gold-plating, from Randy Clarke, the CEO of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, of a bus shelter is very common in transport asset standards. It makes it very expensive to build and maintain infrastructure, money that would be better spent elsewhere to deliver improved safety outcomes.

Problem 4 - We are stuck in an outdated paradigm of car safety.

Vehicle safety testing has delivered remarkable improvements in occupant protection, but it's created a dangerous blind spot. As cars become safer for people inside them, they've become more dangerous for everyone else. Larger, heavier vehicles with higher front ends are proliferating, turning minor crashes into major tragedies for pedestrians and cyclists.

This represents a fundamental regulatory failure. The result is a safety arms race where individual rational choices produce collectively irrational outcomes.

Problem 5 - Cultural acceptance of dangerous driving.

Perhaps most pervasively, we've developed cultural blind spots that make dangerous driving seem acceptable while treating far safer behaviors as problematic. Speeding, the factor in roughly 30-50% of traffic deaths, is widely tolerated and in some places even celebrated. Meanwhile, cyclists riding in shared spaces generate outrage despite causing virtually no serious injuries.

Cultural tolerance makes it difficult for politicians to act, and worse, sees politicians pledging to increase speed limits to garner votes, the equivalent of increasing the amount of alcohol you have before you are legally allowed to drive.

As a consequence, governments are lenient towards dangerous driving, often imposing only minor enforcement penalties and refusing to utilise technologies that could assist, such as unmarked speed cameras or speed-limiting devices.

Fixing the Problems

"The risk of not doing something is not usually thought of, compared to how we analyze the thing that we are doing. The opportunity cost really hurts us as a society—not building homes, not building better infrastructure." - Randy Clarke

The solutions to the transport safety problems I have outlined have to tackle both the political and organisational resistance there will be to change.

Solution 1 - Prioritise the funding for where it will be most effective.

Instead of allocating safety budgets by mode, we need system-wide cost-effectiveness analysis that asks a simple question: where will this dollar prevent the most deaths and serious injuries?

This needs to include a systematic review of asset standards to ensure they are meeting basic cost-benefit requirements.

To succeed, transport agencies will need to work across traditional silos.

Solution 2 - Reduce car use and move people to other modes

One of the most simple conceptual safety interventions is to simply get people out of cars.

This means we need to integrate our transport safety strategies with our wider transport strategies to reduce reliance on motor vehicles and increase the use of public transport, walking, and cycling.

Every person who switches from driving to alternative modes represents a significant safety improvement for themselves and for everyone else on the road.

Solution 3 - Implement frameworks that move away from a travel time savings mentality for urban roads.

Urban streets aren't highways, and they shouldn't be designed like them. Frameworks like Movement and Place acknowledge this reality, but too often remain aspirational documents rather than operational practice. Real change means implementing default 30km/h speed limits on urban roads, designing intersections for pedestrians, and accepting that vehicle throughput isn't the only measure of success.

This requires transport engineers to expand their toolkit beyond traffic optimisation and politicians to promote designs that prioritise safety and liveability over vehicle speed. The irony is that these changes often improve traffic flow by reducing crashes and encouraging alternative transport modes.

Solution 4 - Think holistically about the impact of cars on safety.

Vehicle safety standards need to account for external impacts, not just occupant protection. This means restricting the most dangerous vehicle designs with poor pedestrian safety ratings, while incentivising designs that minimise harm to vulnerable road users.

Given the amounts of these vehicles on our roads and their popularity, this will require gradual implementation starting with the worst offenders.

Solution 5 - Make dangerous driving as socially unacceptable as drunk driving.

Cultural change around speeding and aggressive driving requires sustained effort across multiple fronts: education campaigns that highlight the real consequences of dangerous driving, enforcement systems that make detection likely, and penalties that reflect the seriousness of the offense.

This is about changing social norms so that speeding becomes as socially unacceptable as drunk driving. Success here creates political space for other necessary reforms.

Conclusion

The path forward on transport safety requires us to stop maintaining systems that predictably produce harm.

The five problems outlined here are a result of a transport paradigm that does not think systematically about safety.

Real safety leadership means making difficult decisions. It means explaining to communities why their residential street needs a 30km/h speed limit, even if it adds two minutes to some journeys. It means redirecting gold-plated infrastructure budgets toward proven interventions, such as protected bike lanes. It means confronting the uncomfortable reality that our current approach to transport safety is far from optimal.

The opportunity cost of the current systems is measured in lives lost. But the opportunity of getting this right extends far beyond safety statistics; it encompasses healthier communities, cleaner air, more liveable cities, and transport systems that serve everyone.

Every day we maintain the status quo is another day we choose preventable harm over proven solutions.

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