AAA Foundation President's Corner (cont.)

Although traffic safety has improved, we’re not doing as well as many other countries. Prior to the mid 1960’s, the U.S. enjoyed the greatest level of traffic safety in the world by any measure; whereas today, the U.S. has fallen behind most of Western Europe and Australia in terms of fatalities per mile driven. Evidence suggests that these countries have achieved—and are still achieving—greater safety gains than the U.S. because they are willing to set more ambitious safety performance goals than we are, and because they are willing to do more to achieve them.

The official safety performance goal of the U.S. Department of Transportation is to reduce the motor vehicle fatality rate to one fatality per 100 million VMT by 2008. In 2005 the U.S. saw its first increase in the fatality rate in two decades. We are no longer moving in the “right direction” too slowly—as we had been for the past decade—now, we’re moving in the wrong direction. Even if we were to achieve this goal, we would still be writing off roughly 30,000 annual deaths as the socially accepted price of our mobility, and that’s before accounting for the projected travel increases.

This provides a stark contrast to the picture in much of Europe and Australia, where traffic injuries, deaths, and rates of both, have been reduced substantially over the past decades; where the target is a safe system that minimizes opportunities for crashes to occur and virtually precludes disabling or fatal outcomes by limiting crash severity; and where the measuring stick is the actual number of traffic casualties, rather than a rate that accepts the notion that increases in driving invariably lead to increases in crashes, injuries, and deaths.

To make real progress, we must transform our way of thinking. The AAA Foundation has taken on “traffic safety culture” as a long term research focus area and has recently released a compendium of research papers on safety culture. The team will begin conducting periodic surveys to assess the public's knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and support for change on a variety of issues related to traffic safety. Look for an update in our next newsletter.

Best regards,

Peter Kissinger
President & CEO