Road safety: defeat, complicity and the bankruptcy of science

✍ Scribed by John Whitelegg

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1983
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 692 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0001-4575
• DOI: 10.1016/0001-4575(83)90070-2

✦ Synopsis

Road traffic accidents (RTA's) continue to be a serious problem. The paper argues that much research and effort to minimise this problem is locked into a fundamental misconception in so far as it assumes that blame, responsibility or engineering inadequacies can explain RTA's. The whole system of motorised transport, mobility patterns, land uses, governmental intervention and large company support has deprived society of realistic alternatives to the motor car and bequeathed a delicient technology with several societal disbenefits. Long term solutions to the problem of RTA's involve basic change to this systems design. Anything less will continue to reinforce the present trajectory.