Research Agenda

The Foundation has already taken important steps towards enhancing the traffic safety culture in the U.S.  To ignite national dialogue, and to strategically plan its future work, the Foundation developed Safety Culture in the United States: The Journey Forward. This groundbreaking report includes over twenty papers written by top experts in diverse fields including transportation, public health, public policy, psychology, and several others, addressing what safety culture is -- and more importantly -- what needs to be done to improve it. The publication continues to resonate with the traffic safety community for its unique and timely contributions, thus establishing the Foundation’s leadership role on the issue, and providing the basis for the core activities proposed here.

To attack this vital issue, the Foundation has completed an initial round of public surveys to assess the public’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to traffic safety -- or in short, the traffic safety culture. Already a long-established practice in Europe, Australia, and Canada, these initial surveys will provide a first glimpse into the safety culture in the United States, from which the Foundation can then evaluate and measure changes.  Ultimately, this information will ignite action, including targeted information dissemination, outreach, and specific education activities to effectively reinforce positive trends and reverse negative trends, to foster the growth of a culture that demands traffic safety.

The Center will expand and refine its survey program, to gain a more comprehensive appreciation of the current traffic safety culture, and, more importantly, what can be done about it.  This will involve studying not only individual attitudes and behaviors at the national level, but also how they may vary at regional or local levels, and across cultural populations.  Moreover, an expanded survey program will enable the Center to drill down on significant national issues such as speeding, drinking and driving, and distracted driving, in greater depth than is feasible in a broader survey that intends to assess safety culture at a higher level.  Digging deeper into specific issue areas would require targeted and specific survey instrument development and application.

Building on information gleaned from the Center’s public surveys and other research, the ultimate goal is to develop a “Safety Culture Index”.  Roughly analogous to the Consumer Price Index, the Safety Culture Index will provide a tool to benchmark and measure changes in safety culture of road users across states, over time, and relative to other countries.  Such an index will comprise a variety of indicators related to people’s attitudes toward traffic safety problems, support for solutions, civic engagement in public debate, other socio-economic factors, as well as actual driving behaviors.  This project is highly scalable, can provide state and local regulators with measurement data to advocate for change, engages media, and significantly leverages existing data collection efforts already underway.

The Center’s safety culture research initiative will also include the organizational “cultures” of the public agencies that are responsible for influencing traffic safety.  To motivate improvement in the safety cultures of stakeholder groups, the Center will develop a standardized means to assess or “audit” the organizational cultures of public agencies, such as Departments of Transportation, or state legislatures, as they relate to the influence that these organizations can and do exert on traffic safety in their jurisdictions. Once developed, the “audit” measurement instrument could be used by a stakeholder to assess its own or others’ safety culture.  In turn, the general public would see great benefit from comparative measures of agencies, for example, tasked with traffic safety in their own states and/or communities.