Towards “Vision Zero” 2012-01-0288

“Safe Driving” is an essential world-wide automotive requirement. The demand for “Safe Driving” is particularly high in industrialized countries, but it is also growing in the fast-developing nations. However, the annual reduction of serious traffic injuries and fatalities is still too low and the target to halve the number of people killed in traffic in the European Union from 2001 to 2010 has not been met.

Essential influences to close this gap include legislation, road traffic regulations and monitoring, technical improvement of vehicles including active and passive safety systems, the increase of the equipment rate for safety functions and the re-design of traffic infrastructure for safety reasons. During the last years several countries in Europe started to consider these aspects combined in an integrated and general traffic safety policy, i.e. “Vision Zero” in Sweden. This overall approach provides the basis for the ISO 39001 “Road traffic safety management”, which is planned to be published in 2012. This is undisputable an essential step to improve traffic safety, but care must be taken, not to exaggerate administration effort.