Traffic Safety Culture – A New Paradigm For Road Safety?

The cultural approach to traffic safety is a new research perspective which has emerged recently, especially in the US. It is part of the safe systems approach in recent safety research. The project ‘TraSaCu’, which received funding from EU’s Horizon 2020 RISE program and still runs until February 2018 takes up the concept of safety culture which is well established in organisational safety research and applies it to the open realm of road traffic and road safety. In the course of the project a theoretical model has been developed and the traffic safety culture of selected countries has been analysed to demonstrate the concept of traffic safety culture in an applied manner. Existing large-scale survey data on attitudes, perceived norms and self-reported behaviour have been used to statistically extract four scales that are suitable to describe cultural dimensions. Furthermore, factors which determine deliberate (un)safe behaviours and their potential to be changed in favor of higher levels of safety were identified.