The Road to Safety: Vision Zero

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) stated by the United Nations emphasise promoting holistic development and sustainable growth of people and environment across the 17 goals, of which, one is s aimed at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all. Under this, a sub-goal purports to reduce road traffic accidents.

Here we take a look at  Sweden, who have begun the journey to safety in 1997 with the Swedish Parliament implementing a long-term goal and strategy for road safety, Vision Zero. The need for this strategy was to ensure that there was the alleviation of serious injuries or deaths through a road accident and enabled the solution-focused approach where they worked on finding solutions in a format that the country changes the traffic system ensuring accidents do not result in grave consequences - Vision Zero considers road transport system entities viz.  roads, vehicles, and road users to interact with each other where safety can be guaranteed.

Apart from the above, Sweden implemented several activities within Vision Zero to ensure road safety - the increased use of barriers, wire rails, speed-limiting solutions, crumple zones, separation of traffic etc. Some of the other solutions/initiatives include equipping roads with a central barrier to prevent head-on accidents where police control the speed of cars with cameras with four-road junctions replaced by roundabouts. The automotive industry is playing its part by investing in safer cars thereby complementing the measures of the government and the nation has invested in developing technology for self-sufficient vehicles and solutions to eliminate human error.

With these,  Vision Zero has shifted its focus of primary responsibility from individual road-user to stakeholders who design every entity of the road transportation system. Some of the major stakeholders to ensure road safety include, road management bodies, vehicle manufacturers, legislators, commercial transport operators, the police authority, etc ensuring the road user adheres to his/her sole obligation - to comply with laws and regulations.

In a span of fewer than two decades, several parties have come together to ensure that road safety is taken seriously and creating results and progress and the accident fatalities rate has been halved. This is a huge achievement considering the traffic has increased significantly since the onset of the program and yet, the number of accidents/injuries has been significantly low.

The program has definitely yielded results and has aroused interest in several countries. Inspired by Vision Zero, a few of the Nordic neighbours of Sweden have implemented a similar strategy in their countries. In addition, five countries and the UK have adopted the Vision Zero program,  customising it for their respective countries. Some of the countries that have adopted Vision Zero include  Canada, Norway, the USA, the Netherlands, and India.

The results have definitely emphasised the importance of working with multiple stakeholder groups across a multidimensional team is key to holistic development and Sustainable Growth.

Collectively, we can change this World.