The health community uses a harm reduction model that deals with harm reduction at four levels: conceptual, practical, policy, and programmatic. The road safety community has adopted the Safe System as their harm reduction model. The Safe System is underpinned by the key principles: people make mistakes, the human body has limited biomechanical tolerance, there is a shared responsibility for creating a safer system and we aspire for zero death and serious injury in transport. The interacting elements/levers to achieve these principles are road and roadsides (infrastructure), safe people, safe vehicles,?and safe speeds. Using on-road collectors as a specific example, the relationship between the health-based harm reduction model and the Safe System reveals that the Safe System assumes the conceptual, practical and policy levels to be pre-determined, and thus restricts itself to the programmatic level of the health-based harm reduction model.
References
[1]
Woolley, J., Stokes, C., Turner, B. and Jurewicz, C. (2018) Towards Safe System Infrastructure: A Compendium of Current Knowledge. Austroads Report. AP-R560-18, Austroads, Sydney.
[2]
Senserrick, T., Boufous, S., de Rome, L., Ivers, R. and Stevenson, M. (2014) Detailed Analysis of Pedestrian Casualty Collisions in Victoria, Australia. Traffic Injury Prevention, 15, S197-S205. https://doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2014.935356
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Cheung, Y.W. (2000) Substance Abuse and Developments in Harm Reduction. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 162, 1697-1700.
[4]
Turner, B., Jurewicz, C., Pratt, K., Corben, B. and Woolley, J. (2016) Safe System Assessment Framework. Austroads Report AP-R509-16, Austroads, Sydney.
[5]
VicRoads (2018) Safe System Assessment Guidelines.
[6]
Austroads (2005) Balance between Harm Reduction and Mobility in Setting Speed Limits: A Feasibility Study. AP-R272-05, Austroads, Sydney, NSW.
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Islam, M.M., Topp, L., Conigrave, K.M. and Day, C. (2013). Defining a Service for People Who Use Drugs as ‘Low-Threshold’: What Should be the Criteria? International Journal of Drug Policy, 24, 220-222.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2013.03.005
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Austroads (2017) Safe System Infrastructure for Mixed Use Arterial Roads. Technical Report AP-T330-17, Austroads, Sydney, NSW.