Vehicle crash investigation is vital to the advancement of road safety. It is a foundation for determining effective countermeasures and interventions for road safety reform. As the number of cars keeps increasing on our congested roads, accidents are growing, and driving is increasingly becoming more stressful and riskier. It is time to challenge the government’s abdication of its responsibility to keep our roads safe.
The Insurance Association of Malta has expressed concern about the delay in setting up the Road Safety Bureau, an indispensable element that will make our roads safer. The government announced plans to establish the bureau in 2022 as part of a broader reform to consolidate air, sea, and road safety investigations.
Like so many others, this promise has not been kept, with the authorities blaming the judiciary for hesitancy in sharing the contents of magisterial inquiries following serious road accidents.
Implementing a comprehensive road safety strategy is not just important for the insurance industry. An extensive post-crash investigation process is crucial to an effective road safety strategy.
Therefore, it is unacceptable that those responsible for keeping our roads safe keep procrastinating the establishment of this bureau.
The traditional road crash investigation approach often focuses on liability, prosecution and compensation. In crash investigations, we must move beyond the conventional focus on the question: “What caused the crash and who was responsible?” Investigators must ask, “What could have prevented this crash?” An investigation must not be concluded when drivers’ or victims’ behaviour or vehicle breaches of laws or regulations are identified, and compensation is determined.
The Road Safety Bureau will hopefully become a reality soon. Its strategy must be to base its investigations on the dynamic interaction of the risk factors in the driving process. It needs to delve into the conditions built within the system that can create risks that sometimes long pre-date the proximal unsafe act that finally resulted in an injury crash, like a vehicle’s inadequate brake maintenance, commercial drivers’ payment systems, and road environment conditions that may contribute to unsafe road manoeuvres.
The government must ensure that the Road Safety Bureau adopts best practices that focus on the safety of road users and not just identify the causes of accidents. The guiding principles for a prevention-focused crash investigation process must include an in-depth, multidisciplinary investigation providing the most accurate, complete safety data and analysis.
Investigations must also be immediate, with prompt data collection, interviewing witnesses, and informing, as appropriate, families, survivors, and victims of the progress of the investigation.
Investigators must also be impartial and independent to be perceived as trustworthy. If the Road Safety Bureau is not organisationally and financially independent of government, independent oversight must be established as a minimum requirement.
Injury prevention must be the primary purpose of all safety investigations. It must be of paramount importance over prosecution, compensation and liability. Investigators must identify system factors throughout the timeline that could have prevented the crash or increased survivability.
The ‘judiciary hesitancy’ allegedly obstructing the setting up of the Road Safety Bureau must be urgently addressed. The bureau must adopt the best practices used in better workplace safety regimes and the aviation industry to determine crash prevention strategies.
Policymakers must ensure that the focus of crash investigation processes is on understanding the lessons from the preconditions of the crash event to determine what could have changed to prevent or reduce the severity of a crash.
Ultimately, road accidents risk must be identified, policy recommendations made, and reforms implemented.