What 79 council visits taught me about getting to zero, and what your council can do on the next road it renews.
Between July 2018 and April 2019 I visited every one of Victoria’s 79 councils for the Transport Accident Commission. I asked 260 council staff the same 17 questions and drove more than 35,000 km to do it.
One thing was the same in every building. They cared. Engineers, works managers, planners and chief executives all felt it when someone was badly hurt on a road in their patch. Many were doing a fantastic job. What a lot of them did not have was a method, so they carried on with business as usual and asked me the same two things. What can I do when I upgrade this road to make it a Safe System road? What can I do to make this a Safe System community?
This article is my answer.
Where Vision Zero comes from
Vision Zero is not mine, and it is not new. In October 1997 the Swedish Parliament passed a Road Traffic Safety Bill founded on it. Claes Tingvall and Narelle Haworth set out the thinking at a conference in Melbourne in 1999. The goal is that, in time, nobody is killed or seriously injured on the road system. The ethic underneath it fits in one sentence: “Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society.”[1]
Their paper also moved the responsibility. The people who design and run the road system carry the final responsibility for its safety. Road users are responsible for following the rules. People make mistakes, and when they do, it is the designers who must take the next step so the mistake does not kill.[1]
Australia has signed up. The National Road Safety Strategy 2021-30 sets a path to Vision Zero: no deaths and no serious injuries on our roads by 2050.[2] Victoria’s strategy aims to halve road deaths by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050.[3]
The Safe System is the method
Vision Zero is the goal. The Safe System is how you get there. Austroads sets it out as the guiding principles for road safety programs in Australia and New Zealand, built on four pillars: safe roads, safe speeds, safe vehicles and safe people.[4]
There is a fifth pillar that is often left out: post-crash care. It is the time it takes for emergency services to reach a crash and get the injured person to hospital. The World Health Organization made post-crash response one of the five pillars of its global road safety plan.[5]
Trauma medicine calls the first 60 minutes the golden hour. A review of the medical literature found no hard proof for the exact 60-minute mark,[6] but the evidence that delay costs lives is clear. Across 2,268 counties in the United States, crash death rates were 46% higher where ambulances took 12 minutes or more to arrive than where they took less than seven.[7] In Western Australia, people with major injuries in the city reached a major hospital in 59 minutes on average. In rural areas it took 11.6 hours, and the risk of death was more than double.[8]
Three numbers do most of the work. Tingvall and Haworth gave them as the highest travel speeds a road should carry where each type of crash is possible: 30 km/h where a car can hit a person walking, 50 km/h where cars can hit each other side-on at an intersection, and 70 km/h where cars can meet head-on.[1] Every design decision a council makes moves a road towards those numbers or away from them.
Why this lands on councils
I recall that council-managed roads accounted for 31% of lives lost and 36% of serious injuries in Victoria between 2014 and 2018. A council is a system designer in exactly the sense Tingvall and Haworth meant.
Local roads also behave differently from state roads. Austroads guidance for local government points out that they carry less traffic and their crashes are more spread out.[9] A council that waits for a cluster of crashes before it acts will wait a long time, and the next serious crash will happen somewhere else.
What I saw in 79 councils
I recall that 46% of councils had a good knowledge of the Safe System and were delivering good examples of it. The other 54% had a low understanding and a strong desire to do the right thing.
Graded more finely, I recall that seven councils applied the Safe System across the whole organisation. In 29, the engineering team understood it and was building countermeasures, usually driven by one person or one team. In 27, staff could name the four pillars but had little knowledge of how to implement them. In 16, there was little or no knowledge of it.
Many councils in the lower groups were doing Safe System work without knowing its name. One rural city told me its staff knew little about the Safe System. The same team had a railway precinct project that included raised platforms, wombat crossings and road narrowing. A rural shire where I noted the Safe System as a training need had guard rail and wire rope barrier in that year’s works. They did it because it was the best they could do for their community. That matters. A council already doing the work only needs the framework to do it on purpose.
Best practice I saw
Best practice gets a road to the point where a mistake does not kill. Wider shoulders and new line marking help. They do not get a road there. This is the work that does.
A barrier between the car and the tree. Rural council after rural council named trees close to the road as a top safety issue. One shire looked at placing barriers in front of trees when it renewed a road, and drew its line at 200 vehicles a day: below that, better delineation; above it, a safety barrier or the hazard removed. An outer-suburban council was installing wire rope barrier under a greyspot program, at sites that had not yet become blackspots. A third had kept its renewal gap to about five years, which let it add guard rail to most of the roads it renewed.
Raised platforms at intersections. One growth-area council was building a raised intersection and raised wombat crossings, including at school crossings. Another was putting raised platforms on its local collector intersections. A third built its platforms at a grade of 1 in 15 and less than 100 m apart, so the street held no surprises. An inner-city council had put raised platforms at its roundabouts 15 years earlier, so drivers gave way to people on foot.
Wombat crossings. One bayside council was replacing bollards with wombat crossings. A regional city had spent ten years building wombat crossings, roundabouts and narrower lanes through its centre. Its staff called their council brave.
People walking and cycling separated from cars. An inner-city council was building Copenhagen bike lanes, which put a physical separator between the rider and the traffic. A rural shire was building separated bike lanes on a street leading to its schools. A metropolitan council was building a shared path to link a university, a hospital and a railway station, with ten new pedestrian crossings along the way.
Speeds a person survives. One inner-city council had 40 km/h in its residential streets and was taking its main roads from 60 to 50. Two councils were piloting 30 km/h. A small rural shire’s new town centre works slowed traffic to under 35 km/h. Forty is a step. Thirty is the speed a person on foot survives.[1] Shared streets at walking pace were the rarest. I found them in plans, not yet on the ground.
The councils building this work shared five habits.
Road projects assessed. One council put a program of road projects through a Safe System assessment and found treatments it would otherwise have missed. Where the people who renew roads and the people who design for safety planned together, renewals became upgrades.
Programs ranked by risk. One council ranked its local area traffic management and active transport programs using Safe System criteria, so the highest risk was treated first, without political interference.
Trialled before it was poured. One shire used spike-down kerb to trial a treatment on site and win community acceptance before building the permanent version.
Councillors prepared before the decision. At Mildura, my own council, we put the evidence in front of the executive and councillors before 40 km/h went onto every residential street. Most were very supportive. Another council took its 40 km/h proposal to a councillor workshop with an expert who explained what speed does to the chance of dying. They went in prepared and got agreement.
A champion. In the five councils I profiled for their track record, the one constant was a road safety champion: a traffic engineer, a road safety officer or a planner who could carry the argument to management and councillors.
Poor practice I saw
Like-for-like renewal. At one council the operations team renewed roads exactly as they were. The traffic team found out when the construction plans arrived.
Waiting for the crash history. One rural council told me treatments to lower speed were not justified because traffic and crash numbers were low. I recall that only two of the 79 councils had predictive crash risk data such as ANRAM or AusRAP.
“Designed to current standards” as the whole answer. A standard is a minimum. It does not ask what speed a person can survive.
Safety left to the engineers. Most councils did not take a whole-of-council approach and focused only on infrastructure.
Good work kept quiet. Councils with excellent projects rarely celebrated them, so other councils could not learn from them.
One regional council told me its staff were confusing Towards Zero with Towards Zero Waste. Nobody there was careless. Nobody had explained it to them.
What your council can do on the next road
Ask the question at scoping. Every reseal, reconstruction and kerb renewal is a chance to move a road towards the Safe System at little extra cost. At Mildura I looked for safety to be built into works already on the program, not added as a separate line item. Renew it once.
Slow the intersections. Raised platforms work. A study in the Journal of the Australasian College of Road Safety found casualty crashes fell by 63% at wombat crossings and 47% at mid-block platforms, with an indicative 55% fall at raised intersections.[10] Austroads has reviewed how well they work and how to implement them.[11] Where a platform is out of reach, speed humps or cushions on the approaches do the job for less. Roundabouts typically cut deaths and serious injuries by at least 60%.[12]
At Mildura we implanted a compact roundabout into an existing CBD intersection, with speed cushions on every approach. The 85th percentile speed fell from 43 km/h to 19 km/h.[13] At the second site, Eighth Street and Pine Avenue, 99.97% of vehicles enter below 30 km/h. It cost $37,500, took five days to build and has had no crashes of any kind since 2017.
Give people a path worth using. Vision Zero says that where people on foot and cars mix, the speed is 30 km/h, and where that cannot be achieved they are separated.[1] So separate the path. Then shade it, because nobody chooses a hot path. Queensland’s walking guidance notes that trees can lower the temperature of the surfaces they shade by 10 to 25 degrees.[14] A path that is separated, shaded and attractive takes people off the road altogether.
Set speeds people survive. Mildura put 40 km/h on every residential street. ANRAM and AusRAP analysis of the network projected a 34% fall in fatalities. The data answered the complaints.
Make the road readable. No council controls how automated vehicles will work. Every council controls whether its roads can be read. The lane keeping systems in today’s cars steer by machine vision that reads pavement markings and road edges.[15] Clear, consistent, well-maintained lines help those vehicles, and they help every human driver tonight.
Shorten the time to help. A council does not run the ambulance. It does control whether a crash is easy to find and easy to reach. Clear road name signs, rural property numbers, emergency markers on remote roads and paths, and a road an ambulance can get down all help it arrive sooner. In a rural shire, that is the fifth pillar at work.
Make it whole of council. Planning decides where the school gate faces. Works decides what a reseal includes. Communications decides whether the community hears why. I recall seven councils applying the Safe System across the organisation. That is the model.
For regional councils, the Austroads practitioner resources on regional road safety priorities set out 21 interventions under the four pillars.[16] I was a member of the Project Working Group for that work.
Getting to zero
Zero by 2050 will not be reached on state highways alone. It will be reached one renewed street, one slowed intersection and one shaded path at a time, by people who already care.
Pick one project on next year’s renewal program and ask the question at scoping: what would make this a Safe System road? If you want a second set of eyes on the answer, call me on 0408 101 663.
Christopher Davis
Principal, Vision Zero Australia
References
[1] Tingvall, C. and Haworth, N. (1999). Vision Zero: An ethical approach to safety and mobility. 6th ITE International Conference Road Safety and Traffic Enforcement: Beyond 2000, Melbourne, 6-7 September 1999. Monash University Accident Research Centre. https://www.monash.edu/muarc/our-publications/papers/visionzero
[2] Australian Government (2021). National Road Safety Strategy 2021-30. Office of Road Safety. https://www.roadsafety.gov.au/nrss
[3] Victorian Government (2020). Victorian Road Safety Strategy 2021-2030. https://www.tac.vic.gov.au/road-safety/victorian-road-safety/victorian-road-safety-strategy-2021-2030
[4] Austroads (2021). Guide to Road Safety Part 1: Introduction and The Safe System. AGRS01-21. Austroads, Sydney. https://austroads.gov.au/publications/road-safety/agrs01
[5] World Health Organization (2016). Post-crash response: supporting those affected by road traffic crashes. WHO/NMH/NVI/16.9. WHO, Geneva. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/post-crash-response-supporting-those-affected-by-road-traffic-crashes
[6] Lerner, E.B. and Moscati, R.M. (2001). The golden hour: scientific fact or medical “urban legend”? Academic Emergency Medicine, 8(7), 758-760. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2001.tb00201.x
[7] Byrne, J.P., Mann, N.C., Dai, M., Mason, S.A., Karanicolas, P., Rizoli, S. and Nathens, A.B. (2019). Association between emergency medical service response time and motor vehicle crash mortality in the United States. JAMA Surgery, 154(4), 286-293. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamasurg.2018.5097
[8] Fatovich, D.M., Phillips, M., Langford, S.A. and Jacobs, I.G. (2011). A comparison of metropolitan vs rural major trauma in Western Australia. Resuscitation, 82(7), 886-890. https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/assets/files/Comparison_of_Metropolitan_vs_Rural_Major_Trauma_in_WA_Fatovich_et_al_1.pdf
[9] Durdin, P. and Tuke, R. (2020). Local Government Road Safety Management Guidance. AP-R612-20. Austroads, Sydney. https://austroads.gov.au/publications/road-safety/ap-r612-20
[10] Makwasha, T. and Turner, B. (2017). Safety of raised platforms on urban roads. Journal of the Australasian College of Road Safety, 28(2), 20-27. https://archive.acrs.org.au/article/safety-of-raised-platforms-on-urban-roads-2
[11] Blewden, M., Mackie, H. and Thorne, R. (2020). Effectiveness and Implementation of Raised Safety Platforms. AP-R642-20. Austroads, Sydney. https://austroads.gov.au/publications/traffic-management/ap-r642-20
[12] Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (2022). Safe System case study: Rural roundabouts. Case study 22-120. https://nzta.govt.nz/assets/Safety/docs/road-to-zero/safe-system-case-study-rural-roundabouts.pdf
[13] Australasian College of Road Safety (2020). Top road safety award goes to innovative Local Government roundabout project. 17 November 2020. https://acrs.org.au/top-road-safety-award-innovative-local-government-roundabout-project/
[14] Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (2024). Shade and street trees. Pedestrian and walking guidance and resources. https://tmr.qld.gov.au/Travel-and-transport/Pedestrians-and-walking/Guidance-and-Resources/Pedestrian-and-Walking-Guidance-and-Resources/Shade-and-street-trees
[15] Marr, J., Benjamin, S. and Zhang, A. (2020). Implications of Pavement Markings for Machine Vision. AP-R633-20. Austroads, Sydney. https://austroads.gov.au/publications/connected-and-automated-vehicles/ap-r633-20
[16] Tan, T., Wundersitz, L., Stokes, C., Beer, K., Kloeden, C. and Zlatkovic, P. (2023). Practical Approaches for Managing Regional Road Safety Priorities: Practitioner Resources. AP-R700-23. Austroads, Sydney. https://austroads.gov.au/publications/road-safety/ap-r700-23