About Safety Culture

The preponderance of evidence suggests that as a whole, Americans are simply too complacent about traffic safety, and are willing to accept the toll of traffic crashes -- estimated at over $230 billion annually -- as the price of our mobility. While we were once the safest country with respect to standard measures of traffic risk, we now lag far behind most of Western Europe and Australia.  While many other countries have cut their traffic-related death tolls dramatically over the years, ours reached an all-time low 15 years ago in 1992 and has been increasing virtually ever since.

We need to change how our society thinks about safety and we need to foster a stronger safety culture.  A “traffic safety culture” is not merely a culture in which people drive safely, highway authorities build safe roads, automakers build safe cars, and legislators pass effective safety laws. A safety culture entails a network of interdependent relationships in which all members value safety, do their part, and seriously engage in public dialogue to demand that all of the other members do their parts as well.