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30 May 2016

The Significance Of Vision Zero

By Daniel Young


Property worth billions is damaged and lives lost due to highway accidents that occur each year. As a result, a global initiative called vision zero was started to achieve road safety. The short form VZ will be used in this writing, although it is not a standard abbreviation. VZ has the key goal of achieving highway systems in which accidents resulting from road traffic are not fatal.

There are many principles that govern various aspects of the project such as construction of highway systems. These principles are responsibility, safety, mechanisms for change, and ethics. The principle of ethics gives human safety priority over all other objectives in road traffic systems like mobility.

Shared responsibility if emphasized a lot in the responsibility principle in that road traffic system providers and regulators must accept responsibility in achieving the goal. Human fallibility is taken in to account under the safety principle to keep chances of error down. Even if errors are made, the injury caused should not be fatal. The achievement of the objectives also calls for change, which is emphasized under the mechanism for change principle.

As part of the strategy to attain the goals stipulated by the project, limiting of speeds has been suggested in certain areas. Human and vehicular limits are based on to reach the suggested speed limits. For instance, if a person is knocked by a car, they can perfectly withstand the impact if the car is well designed and is moving a speed of less than 30 km/h. Safety of the individual will also still be ensured in frontal and side impacts at speeds less than 70 km/h and 50 km/h, only if the design of the vehicles is good.

If there is need for more speed in areas with high levels of pedestrian traffic, it is suggested that pedestrian crossings should be separated from vehicular traffic. Otherwise, vehicles should only travel at speeds less than 30 km/h when moving through urban areas. In areas where the road is designed to prevent any form of frontal or side impacts, the initiative suggests that car can move at speeds above 100 km/h.

The possibility of frontal and side impacts can be prevented in many ways. The first method involves separating opposing traffic through the construction of crash barriers. Also, vulnerable road users and slower vehicles can be prohibited from accessing road sections on which vehicles are required to move at high speeds. Additional methods is limiting access and using grade separation.

There have big differences in the adoption of VZ in different countries. Some states have enforced the initiative on all road systems and areas while others have limited it to specific roads and regions. For example, Edmonton city was the first Canadian city to adopt VZ while other cities adopted it at different times later.

Developed states have experienced the impact of the project to the highest level. Fatalities due to traffic accidents have been reduced significantly. However, poor countries have adopted the initiative rather non-uniformly and there has been a continuous increase in traffic fatalities. The project is quite promising and the achievement of zero fatalities is a goal that can be achieved on a global scale.




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