Our Approach: The Safe System

Traditional road safety strategies primarily focused on modifying road-user behaviour to prevent human error. While emphasising individual responsibility through awareness campaigns and penalties yielded some results, this approach has inherent limitations in significantly reducing fatalities and serious injuries.

Recognising these limitations, Sweden pioneered the ‘Vision Zero’ concept in the 1990s, fundamentally shifting the perspective. This led to the development of the Safe System Approach (SSA), which views road trauma not merely as the result of individual error, but as a systemic failure the transport system itself must be designed to prevent or mitigate. Now adopted globally, the SSA underpins the UN’s Global Plan for the Decade of Action on Road Safety 2021-2030 and the targets set by the Stockholm Declaration.

The Safe System Approach accepts that humans inevitably make mistakes. Therefore, it places the responsibility on system designers and managers – encompassing planners, engineers, policymakers, enforcement agencies, and vehicle manufacturers – to create a road transport system that anticipates these errors and protects users from death or serious injury when crashes occur. The focus shifts from solely correcting user behaviour to identifying and rectifying systemic risks and implementing effective, layered countermeasures.

In essence, this approach abandons the unrealistic goal of creating infallible road users. Instead, it aims to create a forgiving system that minimises the consequences of predictable human error.

Guiding Principles of the Safe System Approach

  1. Deaths and Serious Injuries are Unacceptable: No loss of life or life-altering injury on the road network is acceptable.
  2. Humans Make Mistakes: Road users will inevitably make errors; the transport system must be designed to accommodate this fallibility.
  3. Humans are Vulnerable: The human body has limited tolerance to impact forces; therefore, crash energies must be managed below the threshold likely to cause fatal or serious injury.
  4. Responsibility is Shared: Road safety is not solely the responsibility of road users. Those who design, build, manage, and regulate the road system share responsibility for ensuring safety outcomes.
  5. Redundancy is Crucial: All parts of the system (roads, speeds, vehicles, users, post-crash response) must be strengthened so that if one part fails, other layers provide protection.
  6. Safety is Proactive: Risks must be identified and mitigated systematically, rather than waiting for crashes to occur and reacting afterwards.

Core Elements of the Safe System Approach

The Safe System approach moves beyond traditional enforcement and education as standalone solutions, integrating efforts across several key elements that must work together:

  • Safe Roads and Roadsides: Designing and maintaining infrastructure (e.g., median barriers, roundabouts, forgiving roadsides, protected crossings) that prevents crashes or minimises their severity when they occur.
  • Safe Speeds: Managing speeds appropriate to the road function, design, and mix of road users, aligning with human injury tolerances.
  • Safe Vehicles: Promoting vehicles equipped with crash protection and crash avoidance technologies that enhance safety for occupants and other road users.
  • Safe Road Users: Fostering alert, unimpaired, and compliant road user behaviour through education, licensing, and enforcement, all operating within the context of a system designed for safety.
  • Effective Post-Crash Care: Ensuring timely emergency medical response and appropriate trauma care to increase crash survival rates.

Improving safety across all these interconnected elements creates multiple layers of protection, significantly reducing the likelihood of death or serious injury on Malaysia’s roads.