Community responsibility for road safety

No road death, no road injury – a future where every journey is a safe one. This is our ultimate aim at the TAC, a vision we believe can be reached when every company, every business and every person – the whole community – takes responsibility for road safety.

To achieve this, we have adopted a safe system philosophy on road safety. This is a holistic method that aims to minimise the risk of death or serious injury on the roads by taking into account the interaction between roads, vehicles, speeds and road users.

While people are fallible and often do make mistakes on the road, road trauma should not be accepted as inevitable. Within the safe systems model, if a mistake is made on the road the impact is severely reduced or negated by safer roadssafer vehicles, safer speeds and safer people.

In a road crash, the amount of force a person can absorb depends on the amount of protection they have. This protection is increased when we work within the rules of the safe system, resulting in no death or injury. The safe system approach is only effective when rules are obeyed – such as keeping to speed limits, avoiding dangerous driving as well as the provision of safe roads and safe vehicles.