Putting people at the heart of road safety

Globally, more than two people die every minute in a road traffic accident, and it is the number one killer of people aged between five and 29 years old. If you are a child or young adult anywhere in the world, the greatest risk in your entire life is of being injured on the road. 

In 2021, there were approximately 1.2 million deaths on the world’s roads, a reduction of around 5% since 2010. That might not sound like much, but it represents significant progress when you consider that the number of cars on the road more than doubled and the global population increased by nearly one billion during the same period. A further 20 to 50 million people are injured every year, many of these resulting in a permanent disability.1

Over the past ten years, road injuries have hovered between the 10th and 14th leading cause of death in the world, behind chronic illnesses such as heart disease or lung cancer and communicable diseases such as Covid-19 or tuberculosis. It is by far the leading cause of preventable (or accidental) death in the world.

Figure 1: Leading causes of death from preventable injury – 000s (Global Health Estimates: Leading Causes of Death, 2021, World Health Organisation).

A top-of-mind-risk

Since 2019, every two years the World Risk Poll has asked people all around the world what they see as the single greatest risk to safety in their daily lives (in their own words). Every single time, road-related accidents has come out as the top answer, even amid major global upheaval during Covid-19, the Ukraine war, and the cost-of-living crisis. In 2023, 16%of the world’s adult population said road-related accidents were the single greatest risk to safety in their daily lives. It continues to rank higher than the next most-cited risks: crime and violence and personal health conditions.
 

Figure 2: Global top ten risks to safety in daily life: percentage who said this was the greatest single risk in their daily lives (World Risk Poll, 2024). 

Traffic accidents also stand out above everything else when you ask people how much they worry about specific types of risks. In the 2023 World Risk Poll, three-quarters (76%)of adults said they are worried that traffic accidents could cause them serious harm, compared to 71% of people who worry about being harmed by severe weather events, and just under two-thirds (65%) who worry about harm from violent crime. The response for traffic accidents was 5%higher than in the 2021 Poll, showing people worldwide are becoming more worried about this issue, despite a worldwide reduction in the number of recorded fatalities.
 

Figure 3: Worry about harm from common risks (World Risk Poll, 2024).

In many ways this is reassuring, because we know that people’s perception of risk has a huge influence on their behaviour. The probability of an accident on any given trip is extremely low, and even though we know accidents occasionally happen, we think they always happen to other people. Indeed, every safe journey you have reinforces the idea that nothing will ever go wrong.

Understanding road user behaviour

As the psychologist and pioneer of risk perception research Paul Slovic points out: “There are only so many things people can worry about and protect themselves against. Unless many hazards are ignored, obsessive preoccupation with risk would preclude any sort of productive life. When choosing which life-threatening events to ignore, those with probabilities near zero are obvious candidates. Indeed, there are many threats that we routinely ignore in order to go on with the business of living: elevators falling, dams bursting, televisions exploding and so forth. For many people, auto accidents may seem so improbable that they fail to incite concern.” 2

When it comes to road safety, research shows that there is often a high degree of rationality involved, and that people’s behaviour is directly related to their view of the probability of an accident happening. This has proved a challenge for public safety campaigns that try to shock people into taking road safety more seriously by showing harrowing images of the victims of road traffic accidents and the vehicles themselves. But no matter how horrific people think the consequences will be, driver behaviour doesn’t change if they think the likelihood of it happening to them remains low. In other words, successful campaigns for safer behaviour must make people believe the likelihood of the risk itself is high if they are to succeed. If people believe it is never going to happen to them, they don’t care much about how awful it might be.3

Whilst we want people to be safer, feeling safe isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes, people become more reckless and increase the riskiness of their behaviour in response to improvements in their personal safety. This principle, known as risk compensation, has been observed since the early days of the automobile.

According to the US traffic safety administration, between 1975 and 2017 seatbelts have saved an estimated 374,276 lives, and 105 countries now have seatbelt laws. Whilst it is true that wearing a seatbelt dramatically increases your chances of survival if you are in a car crash, what does it do to the overall number of accidents?

In 1975, economist Sam Peltzman published a study of US vehicle safety standards imposed in the 1960s and found that although they had saved the lives of some vehicle occupants, they had also increased the number of deaths amongst pedestrians and cyclists. 4 John Adams, a geographer from University College London, published research in 1981 showing that seatbelts led to “no overall decrease in highway fatalities”.5 Sometimes the data shows that our behaviour in response to risk is more complex than we might think.

Culture also plays an important role. A common English language mistake made by Japanese speakers is “I am a safety driver” (instead of “I am a safe driver” or “I drive safely”), picked up from a popular car commercial and now regularly replicated by English students across the country. So are Japanese people really “safety drivers”?

According to the news site Nippon, drivers in Japan wear their seatbelt 99%of the time. Whereas American drivers believe they are perfectly safe, research has shown that Japanese drivers tend to overestimate the risk and also see themselves as more likely to be at fault. This contributes to them having a much higher sense of “dread” over road-traffic accidents, eliciting visceral feelings of terror, a certainty that any accident will be fatal, and the belief that there is little they can do to control the risk. As a result, Japanese drivers buy more car insurance than Americans and their motivation for this focuses almost exclusively on being able to cover damages or harm done to others, and to reduce personal worry and stress. It’s not surprising in an interdependent society where being ostracized from one’s community is a serious penalty. 6

Globally, the causes of road traffic fatalities have been well-known for many years: speeding, driving whilst under the influence of alcohol or drugs, not using helmets or seatbelts, distracted driving, unsafe roads and vehicles, lack of post-crash medical care, and inadequate laws or law enforcement.

“The tragic tally of road crash deaths is heading in the right direction, downwards, but nowhere near fast enough,” says World Health Organisation Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “The carnage on our roads is preventable. We call on all countries to put people rather than cars at the centre of their transport systems, ensuring the safety of pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users.”

If we are to put people at the heart of this system, we must also understand how they think and feel. New measures to improve road safety must be based on good, objective, data as well as insights into the complex psychology that lies behind road users’ behaviour.

• 1

  Global Status Report on Road Safety 2023, World Health Organisation.

• 2

  Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein, Accident Probabilities and Seat Belt Usage: a Psychological Perspective, Accident Analysis and Prevention, vol. 10, (Elsevier, 1978).

• 3

  Ibid.

• 4

  Peltzman, S. The effects of automobile safety regulation, Journal of Political Economy, 83, 677-725 (1975).

• 5

  John Adams, The Efficacy of Seat Belt Legislation (UCL, 1981).

• 6

  Hyakawa, H. et al., Automobile risk perceptions and insurance-purchasing decisions in Japan and the United States, Journal of Risk Research, 3 (1), 51-67 (2000).