A Critical View on Prevention Strategies in the Field of Road Safety

In the field of road safety, research is generally not recognized as necessary. But road safety research does exist, and constitutes a more appropriate basis for studying prevention than moral considerations and the over-simplifications of “common sense”. This paper shows that international literature in this field draws attention to the effects and limits of various prevention strategies: the real but limited and often transient effectiveness of enforcement, ambivalence of technical “improvements”, the complex and sometimes negative effects of education and training, the ineffectiveness of strategies based only on mass communication. The limitations of these strategies are frequently due to insufficient account being taken of the complexity of the systems concerned, and to the low political value of safety (beyond its rhetorical value).