Serious road accidents often end up being life-changing events for many families. While there are economic imperatives to reducing and responding to minor accidents quickly and reducing them through improving traffic management, there is an urgent need to improve the investigations of severe and fatal injury crashes.
The frequent occurrence of severe road accidents on our roads almost invariably has high human and economic costs. When a serious crash investigation occurs, it is normal for police to focus on the culpability of drivers and securing evidence. While this remains an important aspect, a broader approach to identifying systemic failures that led to the crash provides valuable information to allow road safety measures to be planned and applied when risks are identified.
A safe system approach to road safety must be based on safe roads, safe speeds, safe people and safe vehicles. Every safe system accident investigation must focus initially on an individual crash. However, by collecting and reviewing data from multiple crashes, the authorities can identify broader crash trends and the more significant risks.
The media often make laconic comments when reporting a serious road accident, such as ‘the police are investigating the cause of the accident’ or the accident happened when ‘the driver for some reason lost control of the vehicle’. The insurance assessors may have a better insight as, for obvious reasons, they delve into the police report to determine the extent of their liability to the insured party. These practices hide the fundamental challenge of learning lessons from serious accidents to improve road safety.
Traditional views of a crash are to place blame on young, speeding, inattentive and alcohol or drug-affected drivers who are not in complete control of their vehicles. However, a more thorough and complete investigation can identify all contributing factors that can help prevent the recurrence of serious road accidents.
There could be many contributing factors behind most road accidents. These include speed limits above the design specification for the road, roads lacking safety features like no centre or side barriers, zebra crossing located in dangerous road junctions, unsafe vehicles despite passing the VRT, and carless road users who use mobile phones while driving, are affected by abuse of alcohol or drugs, and driving while fatigued through long working hours.
A rethink of road safety strategy must avoid focusing on preventing all crashes
While this list of possible contributory causes is not exhaustive, it illustrates how a thorough investigation must be conducted to gather all relevant factors beyond the driver’s behaviour. Training and ongoing skills development are required to build competency among specialised police to allow comprehensive road accident investigations.
A rethink of road safety strategies must start with a soul-searching exercise to determine why we are experiencing so many serious road accidents. We must ask whether police have the time, resources or systems to get to the accident spot quickly enough to conduct their investigations. Today’s paper-based procedural system is subject to human errors like inaccurately recording injuries or failing to thoroughly report all injured victims, where multiple vehicle passengers are affected.
At a minimum, a review of road safety policies must consider the volume of random police breath testing carried out during high hours of the week when alcohol-impaired driving peaks. A review must also consider the speed and misuse of mobile phones while driving, which are regularly enforced, and assess whether public awareness campaigns are being supported to deter these behaviours.
A rethink of road safety strategy must avoid focusing on preventing all crashes. This approach could lead to road safety investment in locations where many minor crashes occur, distracting road safety authorities from addressing fatal and severe crash localities. It is also inappropriate for police to target enforcement activity at times and days of the week that will not prevent serious crashes, e.g., overemphasis on daytime minor crashes in peak commuter traffic periods.
The objective of a review of road safety policies must be to ensure that well-trained police can investigate an accident, identify contribution factors, accurately record the injuries that occur, victim details, time, date, place and other data, and submit a thorough report. The data can then be entered into a crash database that would provide a comprehensive view of the severe and fatal injuries that occur in a particular locality and the crash causes can be identified.
Reducing severe road accidents can only occur through initiatives such as targeted road engineering improvements, legislative changes, targeted police enforcement and supporting public awareness campaigns. All these initiatives require a revamping of serious road accident investigations methodology.