Improving Road Safety
in the OIC Member States
18
The procedures developed for conducting capacity reviews incorporate a model that is today
considered state of the art (Bliss & Breen, 2009; Howard et al., 2010; ISO, 2012; Schermers,
Labuschagne & Botha, 2013). The World Bank procedures have been specifically developed so
that these apply to all countries, irrespective of the state of road safety development. It is one of
the first integrated approaches to assessing the state of road safety in a country. It is also the
first approach that has been adopted as the framework for an international standard on road
safety management.
3.2 The Safe Systems Approach
The Safe System approach was conceptualised with the introduction of the Dutch Sustainable
Safety approach (Koornstra et al., 1992; Schermers, 1999; Wegman & Aarts, 2006) and the
Swedish Vision Zero (Tingvall & Haworth, 1999). This thinking laid the foundation for the
recommendations developed by WHO (World Health Organisation, 2009) and United Nations
(United Nations, 2011) and was incorporated into the OECD report “Towards Zero” (OECD,
2008) and the World Bank Country Guidelines for the Conduct of Road Safety Management
Capacity Reviews (Bliss & Breen, 2009). The World Bank guidelines were developed specifically
to promote the Safe Systems Approach and to introduce road safety capacity reviews as a first
step to redress the growing road safety problems.
The underlying principle of the Safe Systems Approach is that the entire transport system is
designed around the limitations of the road users (Koornstra et al., 1992; OECD, 2008; Tingvall
& Haworth, 1999; Wegman & Aarts, 2006). It must be designed to accommodate and
compensate for human error. In other words, a safe systemaccepts human failures andmitigates
for these accordingly. A Safe System has the following characteristics (adapted from OECD,
2008):
 Road users that make mistakes, irrespective of efforts designed to prevent incidents.
 Designers and operators of the road transport system that accept and embrace a shared
responsibility for the safety of the system.
 Users of the road transport system that accept the responsibility to use the system as it is
intended to be used, adhering to rules and regulations.
 Safety management decisions that are aligned with other transport and related policy goals
and decisions (i.e. road safety management does not occur in a vacuum and takes into
account the broader transport related economic, human and environmental goals).
 Road safety interventions that aim at meeting long term goals.
The Safe System approach aims to minimise crashes and where these cannot be avoided, to
ensure that the level of injuries are minimised to the extent that fatal and serious injuries are
prevented, as illustrated i