The Road Ahead

TE/2004/023097 Published in the Journal of Transportation Engineering, Vol. 131, No.5, May 2005, 333-339

The Road Ahead Ezra Hauer1 Abstract. Our road safety future is shaped by decisions that affect the amount of trip making, mode of travel used, kinds of infrastructure on which travel takes place, vehicle fleet, technology in use, and the prevailing norms of behavior. While in the past most such decisions were based on intuition and judgement, there is an obvious trend towards decisions based on fact and science. This transition from a ‘pragmatic’ to a more ‘rational’ style of road safety management is hungry for factual knowledge and for professionals to be its purveyors. In consequence, a broad class of professionals, those who influence the future of road safety, needs to be trained in what fact-based road safety knowledge exists. In addition, a vibrant, competent community of road-safety researchers has to be created. They need to be trained in the same road safety knowledge as well as in research methods. Above all they need to be freed from the constraints imposed on them by a myopic class of research administrators. The best interest of society is to move toward the gradual establishment of the rational style of road safety management; it is the engineer’s professional obligation to promote this societal interest. Key Words: Road safety, professionalism, training, research

Road safety management is in transition. The transition is from action based on experience, intuition, judgement, and tradition, to action based on empirical evidence, science and technology; from consideration of road safety that is tacit and qualitative, to consideration of road safety that is explicit and quantitative. Other fields went through the same metamorphosis. It occurred in the military perhaps in the 1940s and in medicine and agriculture even earlier. In road safety, the transition from reliance on intuition to reliance on science is already in progress and is accelerating. The following is an attempt to describe the nature of the transition and some of its implications. To begin, it will help to be clear about what shapes our road safety future and what managing road safety means. Next I will show that those who now plan, design and operate the transport system have had virtually no training in road safety and that the guidance documents which they use are the embodiment of judgement, not of empirical fact. Third, I will argue that 1

Ezra Hauer, Professor (emeritus), University of Toronto, 35 Merton Street, Apt. 1706, Toronto, Ontario, M4S 3G4, Canada. [email protected] 1

there is a gradual emergence of tools and practices that are based on quantifiable empirical fact; that we live the beginning of the transition from pragmatic to rational road safety management. Finally, I will claim that the emergence of this new attitude is hungry for knowledge of fact and hungry for trained personnel. Just as health cannot be delivered without investment in the training of nurses and physicians, or without steady support for research institutes, libraries, medical schools and laboratories, so road safety cannot be delivered rationally without stable investment in research and manpower training. 1. WHO AND WHAT SHAPES OUR ROAD SAFETY FUTURE In broad brush strokes, the number and severity of future crashes is determined by: The future amount of trip making (how many trips, how long); The mode of travel used (on foot, by bicycle, as a rider in public transport, in a private car) and by the mode of goods transport used (car, air, truck, rail); The kinds of infrastructure on which this travel and transport will take place(i.e., road class, access control, intersection density, road design and traffic control, busway, subway, etc.); The vehicle fleet and technology in use; The prevailing demography, norms of behavior, human abilities and human limitations. This list is an expansion of the more traditional view that sees crashes as the result of bad behavior (drinking, speeding, reckless driving etc.) and of bad roads ( low pavement friction, short sight distances, illegible signs, etc.). The expansion is in the claim that the size of the road safety problem depends mainly on the quantity and quality of exposure (how much travel, by what mode, on what kind of road, by what kind of vehicle). From the vantage of this broader perspective it follows that those professionals and decisions-makers who by their plans, designs and decisions influence the future amount of trip making, its mode, who shape the details of the infrastructure, the vehicles and technology in use, and those who mold the norms of behavior, they also shape the road safety future of a society. Who are these professionals and decision-makers? The list of professionals should include not only the law enforcement officers, driver educators, highway designers and traffic engineers. The amount of travel and its mode depends on land use and location decisions, on policy, budgets, taxation a similar factors. The professionals who influence these decisions are town planners, architects, municipal engineers, transportation planners and economists and the like; the list of decision-makers consists of those who will consider and make decisions using the recommendations made by the aforementioned professionals, i.e., politicians, legislators, officials on planning boards, officials of the departments and ministries who approve planning and design documents, etc. I can now say what is meant by the phrase ‘Road Safety Management’ - it is the sum total of activities that will affect the number and severity of future crashes. These activities are of 2

two kinds. First, there are many who attempt to influence road safety by premeditated actions and programs. This includes various safety-oriented activities of the federal, state (provincial) and municipal governments, of the safety councils, the police, the motor leagues, the driver educators, the coroners etc. Second, there is the set of activities and programs that influence road safety but do not have road safety as their central aim. This includes all planning (provincial, regional, urban, transportation), almost all transportation engineering (highway and traffic), much of motor vehicle manufacturing and most of transportation regulation. Both kinds of actions make up the amorphous safety management system and jointly determine how many will be killed in crashes, how many injured, how much property destroyed. These few opening paragraphs are an attempt to cause a shift in the reader’s mind from the parochial view of the road safety as being the problem of unruly drivers and bad roads to a more dispassionate and broader perception of what determines the size of the future road safety problem. The central claim is that the size of this problem is influenced by diverse decisions made by a large array of professionals and decision-makers. What must they know to make wise decisions? The answer depends on the style of road safety management that society will adopt. 2. ON TWO STYLES OF ROAD SAFETY MANAGEMENT. There are two prototype styles of road safety management, marking two ends of a scale. Call one the pragmatic and the other the rational style. The pragmatic style stems from the confluence of two main motivations. It rests on widespread popular beliefs about road safety, and on the narrow self-interest of organizations. The popular beliefs may pertain to the efficacy of police enforcement, the importance of passing stricter laws and of firmer punishment, the need for better driver education and more stringent test. The self-interest of organizations pertains to the need to be popular, to show concern and initiative, to maintain budget, influence, manpower, income etc. The pragmatic style of road safety management is a prototype. There is no intent to claim that any real organization fits this mold. However, if one did, then those in its employ would not really need to know any facts about road safety, other than facts about what the widely held lay beliefs are. The organization would have no use for research other than the research of public opinion. There would be no real reason to ascertain what the safety consequences of any initiative were, except if they seemed favorable and could be used for public relations. The rational style, in contrast, is rooted in the desire to reduce the harm of crashes efficiently. One wishes to foresee the road safety consequences of decisions and actions, to ascertain their cost, and to balance costs and gains. One also wishes to improve the management of safety in the light of what can be learned from experience and experiment. Again, perhaps no real organization behaves in this manner. However, if one did, professionals in its employ would need to use what factual knowledge exists and the organization would wish to do evaluative research in order to learn from experience. These two ends of the scale are shown in Figure 1. 3

The Pragmatic Style

The Rational Style

Based on lay beliefs and on the self interest of organizations

Based on expected consequences

Does not require knowledge of fact Does not conduct evaluative research

Needs factual information Learns from experience

Figure 1. The two styles of road safety management

Where on this scale is the operation of a real actor or organization can be ascertained by asking a few questions: (1) Does the actor or organization require that extant factual knowledge about the safety consequences of decisions be ascertained? (2) Does the actor or organization employ or buy advice from people who have been trained in and have acquired factual knowledge about road safety? (3) Does the actor or organization do evaluative research to learn about the success or failure of its actions? If the answer to these questions is ‘NO’, the style of the actor or organization is close to pragmatic. In these test questions the phrase ‘factual knowledge’ was used. A brief clarification of its meaning is required. Intuition and experience are fallible guides to road safety. Neither intuition, nor lay beliefs, nor personal or professional experience can tell one by how much wider lanes or more speed enforcement will reduce accidents. Only scientific research can do so. This is well accepted in medicine, education, and most similar fields. Thus, the phrase ‘factual knowledge’ means information accumulated by research that is based on data, measurement, and experiments and is extracted from these by defensible means. The factual knowledge I speak of is mainly about the link between action and its consequences in terms of crash frequency and severity. At present, such factual knowledge is not part of the training given to professionals whose decisions affect crash frequency or severity. I can attest to the verity of this statement because, for twenty seven years I taught traffic engineering, highway design, and transportation planning to budding civil engineers. Civil engineers graduate from a four-year program without being taught about the link between the design decisions they will make and the crash frequency and severity that will follow. True, they may take a course or two about traffic and highway design. In the traffic course most of the time will be devoted to capacity and delay; in the highway design course to geometric design standards. The road safety consequences of their engineering design decisions will not be mentioned.

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Some will object to this statement and claim that concern for safety is implicit in matters such as signal timing procedures or geometric design standards; that adherence to the MUTCD (FHWA 2000) and the Policy (AASHTO 2001) will automatically ensure that a proper amount of safety is built into roads. Such a belief, while honestly and passionately held, is without foundation. The standards and warrants in the aforementioned documents are, by and large, the embodiment of opinion and personal experience, not of scientifically supportable empirical evidence. Having dealt with this issue at length elsewhere (Hauer 2000 a, b), this is not the place to repeat chapter and verse. But the reader can put the matter to a test. Consider, e.g., the task of selecting the radius of a horizontal curve. Does the Policy (AASHTO 2001) tell how many crashes will be saved if a larger radius is chosen? It does not. And yet, research (on two-lane rural roads) consistently indicates that the larger the curve radius the fewer the crashes. The designer has no practical way of weighing the cost of a larger radius (which depends on the specific circumstances) against the associated safety benefits. Nor is there any hint in the long history of the Policy that those who wrote the standard considered the trade-off. In spite of overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, they tacitly assumed that if a curve of a given radius is banked (super-elevated) in accordance with the Policy, the curve is appropriately safe. In fact, the safety of horizontal curves designed by following the Policy is simply unpremeditated. The Policy is the embodiment of tradition, judgement, intuition and experience, not of empirical evidence. As such, the Policy is a part of the pragmatic, not of the rational style of road safety management. The example discussed here was that of horizontal curve design. The reader can ask similar questions about lane width, grade, vertical curves etc. In every case the answer is the same - by adhering to the standards and methods of the Policy, the level of safety built into the road is unknown. The problem is that the authors of such standards were content to deal with safety on the basis of their own understanding, experience, and intuition, without much recourse to empirical evidence available from research. In this manner a long tradition arose that defined safety in terms of sight distances, overturning moment, separation between oncoming vehicles, and similar surrogates, a tradition that divorced road safety from what it really is - namely crash frequency and severity. The link between the surrogates and crashes was simply assumed to exist. As a result, adherence to such standards is in the domain of what was called ‘pragmatic, not in the domain of the ‘rational’. By teaching this material to undergraduate civil engineers the illusion is created that by following standards and warrants road safety is looked after; civil engineers are not taught to foresee the road safety repercussions of their design decisions. The line connecting the two prototype styles in Figure 1 has an arrowhead pointing to the right. My intention was to show that progress is away from the pragmatic and towards the rational style of road safety management. That this is indeed the direction of change follows from four lines of reasoning. First, the history of humanity is the story of moving away from action based on 5

intuition and belief, and towards action based on fact-based knowledge and science. It would be extraordinary if the management of road safety continued to buck this universal trend. Second, once the intuitively obvious has been implemented, only reliance on knowledge, science and technology holds the promise of reducing the toll of crashes effectively.. Third, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21 st Century (TEA-21) require transportation plans and decisions at the state and metropolitan levels to take road safety into account more directly. A research project (NCHRP 8-44, 2002), the purpose of which is to incorporate road safety considerations into long range transportation plans as required by legislation, is now in progress. In the Colorado DOT, the explicit consideration of safety in major transportation projects is now standard. Fourth, multifaceted movement in the direction of rational safety management is already underway. Consider the following signs: Until recently, authoritative documents about the geometric design of roads contained no explicit information about the crash consequences of routine design decisions. This has changed radically in the recent Canadian Guide (TAC 1999) and modestly in the new US Policy (AASHTO 2001). In the past, roads were designed and built without the designer knowing whether crashes could be saved cost-effectively by a change of curve radius, grade, shoulder width and the like. Nor was it known whether by adhering to standards, money is being spent without a commensurate safety benefit. This is now changing. Some fruits of an FHWA research program are in testing and implementation. Using the new (Interactive Highway Safety Design ModelIHSDM) software tool, the highway designer can predict the crash performance for any road design option on the drawing board. Also underway now is the development of the Highway Safety Manual (HSM). The purpose of this comprehensive document will be to: “provide the best factual information and tools in a useful form to facilitate roadway planning, design and operational decisions based on the explicit consideration of their safety consequences.”(NCHRP, 2003). Note the important operational words ‘decisions’, ‘explicit’ and ‘safety consequences’. The HSM will be aimed at professionals who make road planning, design and operational decisions. The hope is that the HSM will become an influential standard reference, similar to the Highway Capacity Manual. Another current initiative, much broader in scope, is the AASHTO Strategic Highway Safety Plan (AASHTO 1998) and now in process of implementation. Here too the emphasis is on the explicit and the quantitative. Thus, in each target area (e.g., aggressive driving, head-on and run-off-the-road crashes on two-lane roads etc.) detailed guidance will be given to allow rational determinations about cost-effective improvements needed to achieve stated fatality reduction goals. Yet another project has the aim of producing a variety of sophisticated software tools for the identification of sites where cost-effective improvement is possible and tools for road safety diagnosis. Jointly these tools will facilitate the selection of cost-effective treatments for sites. This set of tools (called SafetyAnalyst) “will incorporate state-of-the-art safety management 6

approaches into computerized analytical tools for guiding the decision-making process to identify safety improvement needs and develop a system-wide program of site-specific improvement projects.” (Harwood, 2002) Taken together these activities are a clear indication that the management of road safety is moving from the traditional pragmatic style towards the explicit, science & knowledge-based rational style. 3. SOME IMPLICATIONS It is one thing to argue that the direction of progress is shown by the sense of the arrow in Figure 1; it is quite another matter to provide a blueprint for the transition from the pragmatic to the rational style of road safety management. To remain on solid ground my next remarks are confined to safety management professionals and safety research professionals. On these issues I might be qualified to express views on the basis of both personal experience and longevity. Safety management professionals are the carriers and suppliers of factual road safety knowledge. One can manage road safety in the pragmatic style without reliance on these professionals and what they know. Thus, e.g., one can leave it to municipal politicians to decide when and where to install a new traffic signal, using as guidance the mistaken lay belief that signalization is always good for safety. In contrast, rational management relies on fact-based knowledge and on the professionals who are its purveyors. It is the competent professional must know, e.g., in what circumstances signalization is expected to enhance safety and the professional’s opinion must have a key role in the decision to signalize or not. In the delivery of health we consider it natural that it is trained professionals who diagnose ailments and prescribe remedies, not civil servants or elected officials. Administrators and politicians deal with health policies and priorities, physicians and nurses look after with prevention and treatment The same should (and will) be natural in the rational delivery of road safety. Therefore, rational delivery of road safety will require professionals trained in road safety. Training requires knowledge of fact. Knowledge of fact is the creation the researcher. The researcher also needs to be trained, albeit not in the same manner as the professional whose task is make use of the extant factual knowledge. 3.1 Training of Professionals. Those who by their work or function have an important impact on the future of road safety should receive training. The training they need should enable them to foresee how their choices are likely to affect crash frequency and severity. The workforce in need of fact-based training are not only civil engineers, police officers and driving instructors; the workforce to be trained includes town planners, architects, municipal engineers, transportation planners and all those who advise politicians, officials on planning boards and perhaps others. 7

This immediately raises a question. As noted earlier, the MUTCD, the Policy, and similar documents are very short on fact-based information about the link between decisions and their road safety consequences. One may therefore ask whether the information to be used to train professionals exists. For, if not, how could one devise adequate training programs? It would be very peculiar if in the course of nearly a century of road building and road use we did not learn anything about the safety consequences of our decisions. To give an impression about the prevailing state of affairs, I will describe my experiences in working on the IHSDM (Interactive highway Safety Design Model) project. Recall that the goal of the IHSDM project was to create a software enabling the designer to predict the safety consequences of design alternatives for rural two-lane roads. Design alternatives may differ in horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, lane and shoulder width, number of driveways, provision of left-turn lanes at intersections, and additional factors. To assess the safety impact of design decisions of this kind, the ‘project group’ assembled the relevant published research reports. Some topics were found to have been researched in depth, while about others very little was published. Also, as is usual, the research studies varied in quality and in their conclusions. Once the literature was assembled and reviewed a group of experts met to hammer out what seemed to be the best conclusions that could be reached at that time. The results of their work are now published (see Harwood et al, 2000. The review documents on several subjects can be downloaded from roadsafetyresearch.com). There is no doubt that when new research results will be published, much of what has been stated will need to be modified. Nevertheless, there now exists an authoritative document that is based on the accumulated empirical research, and that, for a fairly large set of design choices, can guide the designer of two-lane rural roads on the question: “What can I expect to be the annual number of crashes on this road if I decide to use design option X?” That heretofore such a question was not asked by highway designers, and if asked could not be answered, may be puzzling to those who are not familiar with the practice of highway design. In this sense the IHSDM work is indeed is a ‘quantum leap’ in present practice. At least in this case, so it turned out, the many decades of accumulated research provided a sufficient basis for building a rational procedure. It follows that the accumulated knowledge on the safety consequences of design decisions for two-lane rural roads is also sufficient for training. Can one provide similar guidance and training on the safety consequences of decisions for multilane roads and for roads that are not rural? Probably yes. Is the same possible on topics such as transportation planning, subdivision design, traffic calming, traffic signal coordination, turn restrictions etc.? On some such subjects enough is known, and giving fact-based guidance is possible; on others little is known and guidance must await new research results. This is not unusual. There are diseases about which medicine knows little and phenomena which scientists do 8

not understand. In medicine, in science and also in road safety, research ensures that the domain of what is known continues to expand. In sum, imperfect as the present state of knowledge is, one could put together a respectable curriculum to cater to many needs. The problem is not so much that of insufficient factual knowledge; the problem is more in the weakness of the demand for it. Today one can devise a long term transportation plan for a region, one can get approval for road network in a new subdivision, one can implement a traffic signal co-ordination and timing plan for a metropolis, one can design a new highway and, in all this, never consider the future crash frequency and severity differences between options and alternatives. Because safety consequences need not be anticipated, training in road safety is not required. Because training in road safety is not required, training is not available, and is not given. How do we get there from here? The necessary first step is to create the demand. This could be done in several ways. One could insist that some professional activities and public decisions must be accompanied by a ‘road safety impact statement’. The need to write such a statement in terms of accident frequency and severity impacts would create an immediate need for knowledge and training. Alternatively (or in parallel) one could insist that only professionals who have been trained in the road safety aspects of their profession and so certified, may sign plans, designs and other documents with significant road safety impact. A third demand-generating direction is the establishment of safety-conscious and knowledge-based procedures in major action centres (the department or ministry responsible for physical planning, the ministry or department of transport, the department or registrar of motor vehicles, the police, the major municipalities and so on). Actions of this kind may seem too revolutionary, abrupt, or impractical. If they seem to be so, it is largely because of the weight and the inertia of how things are done now. I suspect that the travelling public does not know that the infrastructure on which they get injured with statistical regularity is planned, designed and operated without knowledge and premeditation of its safety. If they knew then, what now is considered impractical or revolutionary, would become required and commonplace. Nevertheless, even if the reality of society and of politics compels us to think in small steps, one can still move in the right direction. 3.2 Conduct of research. Research generates knowledge and knowledge is the engine of progress. In road safety, the generation of knowledge has been very slow. True, the problems are not easy to tackle, the data seldom sufficient, and the conduct of controlled experiments not accepted. Yet, given the length of experience we have with road building and road use, and the amount of money already spent on road safety research, much more knowledge could have been expected. The main impediment is that the research enterprise is steered and managed by a top-heavy bureaucratic-managerial elite 9

who are consumed by the need to tightly control the research enterprise and who do not recognize their own limitations. A secondary impediment is in the quality of the road safety research workforce. The two issues are linked and both will be discussed. The first question is: “Has road safety research been producing results that are commensurate with the investment in it? If the answer to this question is “No”, the next question must be: “Why not?” The main purpose of research on road safety is to help answering the question: “How is action ‘X’ likely to affect crash frequency or severity?” Pick any ‘X’, be it the paving of gravel shoulders, signalizing an intersection, allowing longer or heavier trucks, enforcing speed limits any question you like. On some ‘X’ you will find that much research has been done; on another ‘X’ you will find but a few published reports, sometimes none. Consider an ‘X’ the safety effect of which has been studied by many (e.g., the safety effect of lane and shoulder width on two-lane rural roads). Those readers who have attempted a critical review of the literature on any such subject will attest to the fact that many of the research reports found will be quickly discarded. They will be thought too deficient in method, too small to draw conclusions from, inconclusive, obsolete, of obscure message, biased, or otherwise seriously flawed. In the end one is left with very few studies that are not obviously unreliable and the results of which do not contradict each other. That this is not an exaggeration but the actual state of affairs I know from rich personal experience and from noting the experience of many others. The obvious question is why so much effort, by so many, on so many subjects has produced so little light? Why is so much that has been published unsound, inconclusive and generally of little use? The answer becomes obvious if one recognizes how much is produced and published by one-day-wonders, by itinerant and untrained researchers without experience, here today - gone tomorrow. How much research has been ill-conceived by those who set the question to be answered, who provided the money, who approved the research method, who accepted the product and who published the results. Several conditions combine to produce reliable research results. Paramount among those is the condition that the researcher be well trained both in road safety knowledge and in methods of road safety research. That one needs training and experience for good bricklaying and for good brain surgery is well accepted. Nobody assumes that a brain surgeon can build a good brick fireplace nor trust the bricklayer to wield a scalpel against their scull. And yet, for some unfathomable reason there exists a widespread administrative and managerial notion that common sense and an engineering degree are sufficient to do road safety research. Civil engineers typically do not receive any training in the kind of research method needed in road safety, nor do they graduate with much factual knowledge about road safety. Furthermore, nothing in routine engineering practice helps to relieve them of this innocence. In addition, all to often, after the first stab at safety research, the clever junior engineer moves on to tasks with more responsibility and 10

more pay. Thus, even learning to do research on the job is seldom feasible. The upshot is a road safety literature that is produced in part by dilettantes and is replete with dubious conclusions. Dilettantes cannot help but produce unreliable results. Dilettantes would not do much harm if their product was kept out of the pages of the professional literature. Unfortunately, this line of defence has long been breached. Once a piece of research is funded and done, publication follows. Not having a research report at the end of a research contract reflects badly on the sponsor. Barriers to publication exist, but are low. Poor quality research and its unreliable conclusions will find its way to the Transportation Research Record and the ITE Journal because the concept of peer review has been largely corrupted by the same prejudice mentioned earlier. Namely, that to be a referee of a research paper on road safety, all that is needed is common sense; that training in road safety, in research methods, and experience in road safety research are not necessary to be a ‘peer’. In a cynical sense this kind of peerage is unobjectionable; dilettante reviewers are appropriate peers to dilettante researchers. And yet, it is obvious that only trained and experienced road safety researchers and scholars should referee research papers on road safety. The problem is compounded by the managers and administrators, those who decide on research needs, on priorities, on funding, and on who ends up researching what. Their judgment is most likely good regarding questions to which their organizations currently seeks answers. They may know less about what is already known, what research can and cannot produce, and about methods that are likely to produce defensible results. This limitation seriously impairs the quality of their judgement. Furthermore, the manager-administrators have no understanding of, and no sympathy for, the need of theory to guide productive research or the need for research on methodology to produce more trustworthy results. As a result, research is done about what is of immediate concern and what is pressing; very little research is done about what is fundamental and essential for reaching sound conclusions. (Thus, e.g., in spite of decades of interest and dozens of ‘applied’ studies, it is still entirely unknown how truck attributes such as off-tracking, braking efficiency, rollover threshold, steering sensitivity and rearward amplification relate to truck crash involvement. Nobody has done this basic research. And yet, truck safety performance standards are being written using the very same attributes. Similarly, it is well known that before-after studies tend to produce very different results from cross-section studies. And yet, we blithely use results from studies both kind, without ever inquiring which can be trusted and which not.) The manageradministrators have only a dim understanding of the methods by which legitimate results can be obtained and therefore are not qualified to judge what result can be relied upon. And yet, it is this administrative layer who decides what researchers will work on. In short, the lack of appreciation for the need for schooling in road safety and in road safety research permeates all; it is responsible

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for poor management of research resources, bad choice of research targets, for the conduct of poor quality research, and for polluting the literature by bad peer reviews. Another facet of the problem is in the Soviet style of management applied to road safety research. The research topics, budgets, goals and tasks are set by those high-up. Contractors are then allowed to compete for the ‘research’ work. Once the contract is awarded, the contractor has to answer periodically to a project panel which is also composed largely of persons of a managerial mind set. What is conceived as a ‘research project’ becomes in the eyes of the project manager and of the principal investigator a bundle of ‘deliverables’ to be supplied on time and within budget. When the filing of deliverables on time and within budget becomes the measure of success, the quality of the knowledge that has been generated becomes secondary. Practitioners and administrator-managers harbor a deep rooted prejudice against researchers. They think that researchers do not know what questions are of importance; that they are likely to go off on tangents and forget about what the question was; that unless their feet are held to the fire they will procrastinate and not produce. As in all kinds of prejudice, this one too holds a grain of truth. The pursuit of what is presently not known (i.e., research) attracts people who like the quest for the unknown and they will persist in the questioning even when it leads them in unforeseen directions. An administrator-manager may call such directions a ‘tangent’. On the other hand, the researcher’s pursuit of what is not known is predicated on the study of what is known. In this, researcher has an advantage over the administrator-manager. Therefore, the researcher should be allowed to use this advantage in the formulation of research questions and of research programs. An additional advantage of the researcher is in the knowledge of what questions can be answered by what method, if at all. In my opinion, the prejudice of the administrator-manager led to the present marginalization of the researcher and to domination of road safety research by Soviet style control attitudes. The compulsion of the administrator-manager to closely control the research process stems not only from the psychology of mistrust and prejudice against the research class; at times it reflects the self-interest of the organizations to which the administrator-manager owes loyalty. What if research showed that a practice or standard now in use is not in the interest of safety, or if a program which an organization promoted or in which a politician took active interest, is ineffective? Thus, for the administrative mind-set some stones are better left unturned and some research questions are better not asked. For this, control over aims, process and product is essential. The Soviets tried centralized management and it has produced inferior goods. They tried to make painters and writers create what the politburo thought is useful for the ‘people’.They specified what ‘socialist realism’ is and even invented panels to guide and criticize what the artists produce. Can you now name a world-class work of art or piece of word-class literature that has 12

been produced under the Soviet regime (and not by a dissident)? Too much of centralized and intrusive management is an anathema to innovation, invention and creativity. Good research requires a good measure of freedom. If we want to have a vibrant community of road safety researchers who give us new understanding, show promising directions, who bring about breakthroughs, then the instinct to control, to dictate, and to manage has to be scaled back. In my opinion, at present, there is too little freedom and much too much control. Research is not piecework. I do not hope to get sympathy for my argument from the class of administrator-managers. The vibrant safety research community whose absence is lamented is not here to cheer. But this much is certain: material improvement in the product of research in road safety will come from a well trained body of researchers working as equal partners within a framework of mutual respect with managers-administrators. In business, execution is about getting the right product. Focus on execution demands from management a shift of attention from boardroom rituals to production processes. In the business of road safety research, execution is about getting reliable knowledge. Therefore focus on execution in road safety research demands that the administrator-managers shift their attention from their mantras of ‘identification of knowledge gaps’, ‘prioritization’, ‘coordination’, ‘cooperation’ or ‘marketing’ back to the central problem: how to produce useful safety knowledge through research. Having produced many duds in the past, how do we to begin produce reliable results. The idea currently promulgated by the administrator-managers that much can be accomplished by focussing on the management process is completely wrong. We need to build into our goals and collective culture the importance of performing and publishing quality research. Just as the problem is evident so the remedy is obvious. From here on I will assume that we recognized that past research produced too often less than useless results and that it is accepted that execution in research, nor managerial rituals, will bring results. With this as common ground it is possible to specify what is needed to have a healthy road safety research infrastructure. 1. To do good research, the researcher has to be: a. Trained in road safety knowledge, b. Trained in research methods and, c. Consider research as a long-term career allowing for the accumulation of research experience. 2. Only reports that are ‘peer reviewed’ get to be published. For this purpose ‘peers reviewers’ are persons who are entirely independent of the organizations that sponsored the research and of

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individuals performing the research. Furthermore peer reviewers are persons who are on top of the current safety lore and who are experts in research methods. 3. The process of formulating a research program must continue to be influenced by agencies that build roads, operate traffic, set policies, standards, or warrants. However, the process must not be allowed to be dominated by these agencies for they have an understandable interest in what is researched, what the conclusions are, and in what stones are best left unturned. The trained and independent researcher must be an influential partner in the process of formulating research programs, the shaping of RFP’s and the selection of researchers to perform the work. 4. To get good research products the sponsoring agencies must recognize that research is not piecework and cannot be managed as if it was. Describing the four elements of the remedy was easy; it is less easy to think how the transition from the present inefficient research setup to a sounder future can take place. How can researchers be trained in road safety and in road safety research methods if no university offers such a program? Why should young people enlist in a program to be trained in road safety and research methods (even were one to exist) if there are no progressive career paths in road safety research? What would one teach in such a program when present knowledge is fragmented, there are no textbooks, and only few qualified teachers? In addition there is the thorny question of control. How can one induce the agencies that sit on the money (FHWA, AASHTO) to give up their tight control over what is done and how; how can they be made to yield considerable influence over these matters to independent, trained researchers? The key to creating a sound safety research infrastructure is in the creation of demand. If there was steady work, good remuneration and a progressive, secure career path in road safety research, talented people would gravitate to the field; If talented people sought training in road safety research, universities would provide the programs; If graduate programs in road safety were offered, training material would be written. Thus, the problem is structural and begins with creating demand for road safety research jobs. Demand, in this case does not and cannot emanate from the road user. The source of demand for better knowledge can only be created by the public bodies (federal, state and municipal) whose charge is to plan, build and operate the transportation infrastructure. You can be sure that were the transportation infrastructure planned, built and operated by the private sector, the government would be called on to provide the oversight to ensure that safety is built into the infrastructure. (Consider, e.g., NHTSA whose role is to make sure that car manufacturers build appropriately safe cars). But, since it is mostly the public sector that plans, builds and operates the transportation infrastructure, and there is no independent 14

overseer (quod custodiat ipsos custodies?), the demand for knowledge-based safety management has no visible patron. The demand must come from within the public sector, from its enlightened professional and political leadership. Thus, it is the responsibility of the public sector to create the long-term stable demand for road safety research, with the promise of progressive employment for a well trained workforce. If this is not done, future progress will be similar to the past. Gone are the days when teeth were extracted by blacksmiths because they had the tongs and blood was let by barbers because they owned razors. Today we expect dentists and physicians to be trained, to acquire experience and to practice for a long time. Research too is a skill that is acquired by specialized training and by long experience. This is has been a problem all along, but is especially acute now. The transition towards rational road safety management is hungry for information produced by competent researchers. Money is available to do the work and the prospect of much more research money is looming. Who will do the work? 4. AN EPILOGUE. This (invited) article is published in a professional journal. We - professionals - are fortunate to live at a time when the transition from the pragmatic to the rational style of road safety management seems possible. As always, the old and entrenched obstructs the young and emerging. Professionals have an ethical obligation to place the interest of society (of the road users) above other considerations. The interest of society is served by the promotion and gradual establishment of the rational style of road safety management. Therefore, it is our professional obligation to do so. This means insistence on training in road safety knowledge for professionals who affect road safety; this means striving for more influence of empirical fact on decisions that affect road safety; this means support for a well trained and influential layer of road safety researchers who can do their creative work free of unnecessary administrative shackles.

References American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). (1998) AASHTO Strategic Highway Safety Plan. Washington, D.C. American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). (2001) A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets. Washington, D.C. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). (2000)., MUTCD 2000, Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. Washington, D.C.

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Harwood, Council, Hauer, Hughes and Vogt,(2000). Prediction of the expected safety performance or rural two-lane highways. US DOT, Federal Highway Administration, FHWA-RD99-207. Harwood, D.(2002) Draft Work Plan, Comprehensive Highway Safety Improvement Model, Midwest Research Institute, Kansas City. Hauer, E.(2000a). Safety in Geometric Design Standards I: Three Anecdotes. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium of Highway Geometric Design, R. Krammes and W. Brillon (eds.). Forschungsgeselschaft für Strassen und Verkehrsvesen e.V., Köln, 11-23. Hauer, E.(2000b). Safety in Geometric Design Standards II: Rift, Roots and Reform. Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium of Highway Geometric Design, R. Krammes and W. Brillon (eds.). Forshungsgeselschaft für Strassen und Verkehrsvesen e.V., Köln, 24-35. National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP. 8-44), (2002). Incorporating Safety into Long-Range Transportation Planning (Active) National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP. 17-27), (2003).Prepare Parts I and II of the Highway Safety Manual (Anticipated) Transportation Association of Canada (TAC). (1999).Geometric Design Guide for Canadian Roads, Transportation Association of Canada, Ottawa.

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