This article will help you get more out of the safety features around you that already exist.

Have you ever noticed the car in front drive around a speed hump rather than slow down and go over it?

This is a simple example of how many people don't use existing safety systems 'as designed'. Let's take the speed hump example above. Speed humps don't just appear for no reason to bother drivers. They cost money to install and maintain and only appear where a legitimate need has been identified; in front of a school for example.

Wherever a speed hump (also called a speed bump, or more correctly, a traffic calming device) has been installed, there has been crashes, near hits or complaints of 'speeding  drivers' in that precise location.

That's because ordinary drivers have failed to discern the nature and extent risks of driving  through this location.

When you see the driver in front go around a speed hump at higher than the advised maximum, let's say 20 kph, that driver is intentionally going out of their way to ignore the safety concerns of all those who rallied to have the changes made, and put their own personal motivations first. 

There are many examples of people failing to use the road system 'as designed'. Consider the pedestrian that doesn't use a crossing; or walks across against the 'red man'. Once again, we see how an individual's personal motivations trump a well designed and effective safety system. 

It's hard to imagine a safety system that is perfect, but if a driver put a little extra effort in to slowing before hazards, all cyclists wore helmets, and pedestrians used crossings, all these systems would work better.

Two more examples and I'll finish up. Have you ever noticed cyclists riding on the road in traffic when there is a purpose-built cycle lane off to the left and parallel to the road? It's sometimes hard to reconcile cyclists complaining about drivers on the evening news with an empty cycle lane made specifically to separate cars and bikes. Again, the cyclist has a personal motivation that trumps the safety motivation. 

And finally, have you ever seen an 'after-market' bull bar fitted to 4WD. 4WD vehicle safety has come a long way over recent years, particularly since we started to think about them as SUVs rather than the traditional off-road workhorse.     

An enormous amount of work has been done by vehicle manufactures to make 4WD and SUVs less aggressive. International crash tests and "aggressivity" scores are available and you can compare one vehicle to another. Aggressivity relates to the protection offered to vulnerable road users in a crash; particularly pedestrians and cyclists. Fitting a hard and sharp bull bar usually defeats the intentional soft and rounded profile of a modern 4WD or SUV. In addition, rigid bull bars can defeat or reduce the efficacy of other systems designed to protect the driver and passengers.

You wouldn't be permitted to use a chisel as a screwdriver in trade school. Even though you can probably get away with using the wrong tool for the job in the short term, over a lifetime it will come at a cost. So too with not using the road system 'as designed'.

If you’d like help understanding, applying or sharing these principles, please ask.

Cheers, Jeremy Williams

First published December 2021

This article is about the difference between what’s known as ‘relative risk’ versus ‘absolute risk’ and why you need to know the difference. Understanding how to use these ideas is important in a world where often people don’t worry about real and meaningful risks, and often fret about things that almost certainly will never harm them. 
  
When I tune my guitar, I can use relative tuning, or absolute tuning. If I tune my guitar with the correct tonal distance (measured in hertz or the number of vibrations per second) between say the A string and the E string, they are in tune, relatively speaking. When I wind all the strings to the tension necessary to produce the correct tonal distance between them, I can play the guitar and it will sound in tune. BUT, only if I am playing alone. If I want to play with other musicians, I need to use absolute tuning.

When I need to play with other musicians and instruments, it’s critically important that we all set our instruments to the exact frequencies for each note. For example, ‘concert tuning’ means that the A note is generated at 110 hertz. If I’m using relative tuning with my A string tuned to say 95 hertz, we won’t be playing in concert, and the result will be awful to listen to; even though individually we might be in tune (relatively).

Driving is a lot like this. If I always drove on roads by myself, I could do a lot of things that alone were not a problem, and would only affect me if I got it wrong. But when I need to drive ‘in concert’ with others, we need to be working together measuring risks accurately to prevent crashes that could easily be avoided if we were all ‘in tune’ with one another.  

Here are a couple of examples of relative risk.

1. A passenger positioned in the front seat of a car is about 7 times more likely to die in a crash than a passenger seated in the rear seat.
2. Driving with a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of .05% makes the driver about 7 times more like to crash than with a BAC of 0.0%.

Now these real risks are only meaningful if the absolute risk of fatality in a road crash is similarly real and meaningful; and it is.

Here are some examples of absolute risk.

1. The most likely cause of accidental death in Australia (that is not disease or violent crime etc.) is as the result of a road accident.
2. The next most likely cause of accidental death in Australia is as the result of a slip, trip or fall.

For these reasons, I’m particularly careful when I drive, climb or use a ladder etc. When I take my grandchildren in my car, I make sure they sit in the back even though they are old enough to legally travel in the front.   

Now Motorcyclists are around 37 times more likely to be injured or killed in a traffic crash than a car driver/passenger. When I ride, which I do regularly, both the relative risk and the absolute risk are both real and meaningful to me. I put all of my available resources into avoiding a crash and optimizing my safety.

Worrying about flying on a large commercial airliner over a long distance, is not necessary, because the absolute risk of dying in a commercial airliner is so low it is considered ‘risk de minimis’ that is to say, it is very, very, safe indeed and the chance of fatality is almost zero. Now the relative risk between the survivability of an airliner crash by sitting in the front versus the rear of the plane could be calculated, but it’s a moot point, because the absolute risk is so low.
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What’s the main message here? The risks associated with being in an injury or fatality producing motor vehicle crash are both real and meaningful at a personal level.

The good news is there is a lot that you can do to reduce your risk of being injured or killed in a car crash to that something like the airliner example above ‘risk de minimis’.

BUT you need to allocate a lot of personal resources, planning, attention and certain proactive behaviours to manage the risks. Accurate risk assessment triggers this personal expenditure and can definitely help. 

If you’d like to know more about these topics, how to apply them to your personal driving, or perhaps across your team, please call or email me. Cheers Jeremy

During the global fuel crisis that began in 1973, the price of petrol (gasoline) soared. As the cost of travelling by motor vehicle increased, the total number of kilometres travelled per year reduced. Guess what also fell? The road toll.

In fact, the single biggest event to reduce the road toll in the USA, was the 1970's fuel crisis. No other single factor, social, political or economic has had such a direct and substantive impact on death and injury on the road; not seat-belts, ABS or driver training.

I live in Melbourne Australia, today I cannot leave the house to exercise, and I can only go shopping for food once per day, and not more than 5 kilometres away from home. My movement by motor vehicle has dramatically reduced. So too has my chance of crashing and hurting someone else, or myself.

Because I have spent my working life working in road safety, this is great news. But you might reasonably ask, "What about the deaths caused COVID?" That's a great question. Nobody would wish COVID-19 on anyone or the society in which they live. However, while thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have died, or will die due to COVID-19, 1.2 million people die on the world's roads every year, with more than 50 million injuries recorded (according to the WHO). Around 25% of these incidents involve "vulnerable road users" including pedestrians who aren't even drivers or passengers!

So Jeremy, what are you saying? I'm saying that nobody wants to be hurt, but crashes still happen. When we see the cost (including any negative consequences) of driving as high, we tend to protect ourselves more (by driving less, or with more care when we do drive).

Here's another example. Nobody would deny that in winter the driving conditions generally get worse. With less daylight, colder temperatures, foggy windows, and roads impacted by water/snow/ice/mud, you might predict that the road toll would increase. Wrong. Why? Well generally people travel less by car in bad weather, when they do drive they cover shorter distances, and they drive more carefully. This happens virtually everywhere around the world.

So your chances of crashing are significantly influenced by:

• How much you drive, and
• How carefully you drive
  
  

If you took some time to think about how dangerous driving really is, then you could take control and make a significant difference to your chances.

Remember, if you decided to drive more carefully today, or you decided to drive a bit more dangerously today; it wouldn't make any real impact on your 'whole-of-life' chances of crashing. If you truly want to be safer, you need to make the decision to change today, and keep putting in the extra effort every time you drive from here on.

If you're responsible for a fleet of drivers, think about how you can create the circumstances where your team think more about how dangerous driving really is, even if they personally haven't had many crashes.
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If you’d like help understanding, applying or sharing these principles, please ask. Cheers, Jeremy Williams www.drivertrainingaustralia.com.au
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First published August 2020 - Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6696598091547725824?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28*%2Curn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A6696598091547725824%29