Revealing the Complexity of Road Transport with Accimaps

Rich C. McIlroy, Katherine L. Plant, and Neville A. Stanton

Human Factors Engineering, Transportation Research Group, Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton, UK

Abstract. The UK has one of the safest road systems of any country, yet road traffic accidents still represent the 12th leading cause of death. Although casualty and fatality rates have dropped dramatically since the 1980s, there has been little change in the past five years or so, suggesting that roads safety initiatives have plateaued in their effectiveness. Following calls for a new approach to the challenge we adopt a sociotechnical systems viewpoint. Traditionally, road safety has been addressed through the three ‘E’s of engineering, education, and enforcement; we have added to these with an additional four ‘E’s, namely economics, emergency response, enablement, and ergonomics. We use the Actor Map representation, the first step in the Accimap approach to accident analysis, to model the road transport system, with the resulting diagram giving an indication of the level of complexity we must face when designing road safety interventions. The research presented in this article represents the first step in a broader project that takes a sociotechnical approach to global road safety, involving partners in five geographically dispersed, and economically, developmentally, and culturally distinct nations.

Keywords: Accimaps, road safety, sociotechnical systems

Introduction

In 2015, road traffic incidents claimed the lives 1.34 million people (WHO, 2017a). Globally, it is the 10th leading cause of death (ibid.), and the number one leading cause of death for those aged between 15 and 24 (WHO, 2015). Across England and Wales, road incidents represent the 12th leading cause of death (ONS, 2017). In 2016, 181,384 road incidents involving injury were reported to the UK police (DfT, 2017); of these, 24,101 resulted in serious injury, and 1,794 in loss of life. These road collisions are estimated to have cost the UK economy £16 billion in 2015, a figure that rises to £36 billion when including incidents that went unreported (estimated from National Travel Survey Data; see DfT, 2016). Furthermore, although the UK’s roads have become far safer over the past thirty years, with a 68% drop in fatalities despite a population increase of 15%, there has been little change in road fatality numbers since 2010 (DfT, 2017), suggesting that current road safety efforts have plateaued in their effectiveness.

The traditional three ‘E’s approach to road safety, i.e., engineering, enforcement, and education, has had significant and positive lasting effects on road safety. Nevertheless, to make further improvements we will need to consider more than only those three facets of the complex road safety picture. Hence our discussion of four additional ‘E’s, namely economics, emergency response, enablement, and the overarching term that brings efforts together, ergonomics. It is from a viewpoint that has its basis in the socio technical approach to understanding systems and their behaviours that the additional ‘E’s are justified. It is by no means novel to suggest a systems view of road safety (see, for example, Scott-Parker & Goode, 2015; Parnell, et al. 2017); however, an exploration of how human factors and ergonomics analysis and modelling techniques can apply to, and help expand the more traditional views of road safety, is yet to receive sufficient attention in the extant literature. Using Rasmussen’s (1997) Risk Management Framework, and the associated Accimap approach, we aim to address this gap.

The Seven ‘E’s of Road Safety

The Traditional ‘E’s: Engineering, Enforcement, Education

As aforementioned, engineering, enforcement, and education have been critical in improving road safety outcomes in the past, and will continue to be so into the future. Engineering can be broadly separated into two categories through which safety is enhanced; road environment engineering and vehicle engineering. Many of the engineering solutions, particularly in the vehicle, have now become legal requirements in the UK, for example seat belts, crumple zones, anti-lock braking systems, etc. Such is one aspect of the enforcement approach to road safety; enforcing design or engineering standards. Another aspect is the use of law to influence driver behaviour; this can also be split into two broad groups. Firstly, general deterrence of certain behaviours via the fostering of the belief that performing those behaviours will result in a negative outcome (e.g. fine or loss of license). Secondly, specific deterrence through a person being caught performing an illegal action, stopped performing said action (where it is still in process), and punished for the act. Education, the last of the three traditional ‘E’s, can again be considered in two ways; training the driver and educating the public. Driver training is necessary for drivers to acquire licenses, while educating the public can happen in myriad ways, from teaching school children the green cross code to using television advertising to highlight the negative effects of drink driving.

Economics

As aforementioned, the value of prevention of all reported road casualties (not including unreported ones) was estimated at £16 billion for the year 2015 (DfT, 2016). This cost, however, is far less tangible than the immediate cost of building and fixing road infrastructure, or the funding of road safety campaigns; hence, it is perhaps unsurprising that investment in road safety is nowhere near this figure. Improving road safety is not always a case of expenditure, however; income generated through fining drivers caught speeding can more than outweigh the cost of the police patrols required to catch offenders (as was seen in Uganda; Bishai et al. 2008). In the UK, there has been considerable controversy surrounding speed cameras as source of income rather than a means for improving road safety (e.g., Pilkington, 2003), with some news outlets drawing attention to the large revenues garnered in particular areas of the country (e.g. Lydall, 2017). Despite the UK parliament ensuring that the placement of speed cameras is based on safety considerations rather than financial ones (House of Commons Transport Committee, 2016), cost benefit analyses still suggest a net financial gain for the economy (e.g. Gains et al., 2005).

Emergency Response

The quality of emergency care available undoubtedly affects the health outcomes of a particular patient (e.g. Razzak & Kellermann, 2002; Balikuddembe et al. 2017). Regarding speed of response to traffic incidents, it has been demonstrated that timely transport to a hospital is significantly linked with high survival rates (e.g., Clark et al. 2013; Sánchez-Mangas et al. 2010). In England specifically, a review by the Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN; see The University of Manchester, 2015) showed that the survival rates of major trauma patients (many of which are casualties of road traffic incidents) increased by 63% over the seven-year period in which twenty-seven new Major Trauma Centres were constructed (e.g. NHS, 2016). Previous to this, the fall in casualty rates in the UK from road traffic incidents across the years 1978 to 1998 has been partly explained by lower in-patient lengths of stay, higher per-capita levels of NHS staffing, and lower numbers of people (per-capita) waiting for hospital treatment (three proxies for improving medical care standards; see Noland & Quddus, 2004). There is now wide acceptance of the role emergency response plays in road safety. Not only was post-impact care the focus of a recent European Commission report on road safety (European Commission, 2016), but it represents a ‘pillar of action’ in the UN’s Global Plan for the Decade of Action (on road safety; see WHO, 2017b), as well as a key strategy in the World Health Organisation’s world report on road traffic injury prevention (Peden et al. 2004).

Enablement

We use the term enablement here to refer to the activities that make advances in other areas possible. Funding is of course part of this, and is important enough to merit its own section (above), but also of significant importance is the enablement of research through a cultural and societal environment that supports such work, and through the availability of data to allow the research to be undertaken. The UK is home to a plethora of road safety organisations and charities. Historically, these kinds of organisations have had significant impacts on road safety, providing support and funding to a huge variety of road safety projects over the years, and their continued existence is a testament to the societal support that the vast majority of road safety initiatives receive. Additionally, the government itself backs a consortium of research institutes and councils, each of which supports research in different subjects and disciplines. In terms of data availability and openness, the UK is a world leader. Since its creation in 2013, the Open Data Barometer (run by the World Wide Web Foundation; see opendatabarometer.org), has ranked the UK number one (out of 115 countries) in terms of the readiness of a government’s open data initiatives, implementation of open data programmes, and impact of open data on society. Complex problems (such as road safety) require rich, complex data sets to guide solutions (Arzberger et al. 2004), with open access to publicly funded data providing greater returns from public investment (Janssen et al. 2012).

The Seventh ‘E’: Ergonomics

The traditional three ‘E’s approach takes a view of the road safety system that puts the driver squarely in the centre; the roads are engineered around the driver, who is educated to drive safely, and is punished for transgressions. This focus is beginning to change, however, with increased adoption of the ‘safe systems’ philosophy. This road safety perspective has its roots in Sweden in the 1990s (see visionzeroinitiative.com) and one of its central themes is that humans are fallible and that responsibility for road safety should be moved away from road users and placed on road system designers. Although the philosophy is supported in the UK by a variety of charitable organisations, (e.g., PACTS, 2017; Brake, 2017), and Bristol City Council (2015), it has not yet been implemented nationwide across the UK.

Like any approach, the ‘safe systems’ perspective (and the Vision Zero project in which it has its roots) has evolved over time, and now, in many descriptions of it, includes additional considerations such as emergency response, funding, and legislature (aspects included in the UK Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety’s description of the approach; PACTS, 2017). Nevertheless, inclusion of these considerations of higher system levels is not always seen. Focus is often still limited to the driver, with emphasis on designing a road system that tolerates the errors of the user, rather than designing a road system that takes into account the interaction of the system components that influence system behaviours. We wholeheartedly agree that we should move away from placing all blame on the road user; however, this should not be simply shifted to the system designer. Indeed, nor should it be shared between only those two actors; complex systems have numerous hierarchical levels to them (more on this below), and blame is shared across all of those levels, with multiple actors and organisations responsible for system outcomes. The language used in some of the safe systems publications, i.e., that humans “make mistakes”, suggests a persistence of the idea that the human is the faulty element in the system, the component that is likely to fail. We would argue that a fundamental shift in viewpoint is required, to one that takes the system in its entirety; it is not the error-prone human, but the nature and design of the system as a whole from which failures emerge.

To this end, we advocate a socio technical systems approach, rather than the safe systems philosophy of the Vision Zero project. Although similar in name, these approaches are not the same. The ‘safe systems’ philosophy has its foundation in road safety efforts in Sweden in the 1970s; the ‘systems approach’ can be traced back as far as the early 1930s (Heinrich, 1931). We use the term ‘sociotechnical’ (a largely synonymous term that first appeared in the early fifties; e.g. Trist, 1953) as this not only neatly alludes to the fact that the system in question involves both social and technical elements, but also is more easily distinguishable from ‘safe systems’.

Accimaps

There are a wide variety of sociotechnical models and frameworks that can be used to hierarchically describe a given system; however, it is Jens Rasmussen’s (1997) Risk Management Framework that has received the most recent attention in the road safety domain (e.g. Salmon et al., 2013; Newnam & Goode, 2015; Scott-Parker et al., 2015; Parnell et al., 2017). Rasmussen’s (1997) original framework contained six levels, from the equipment at the bottom of the hierarchy up to the central government at the top. This has since been expanded upon to include two additional, higher levels; national and international committees (Parnell et al. 2017). The Accimap approach to accident analysis uses this framework as its basis, considering accidents as emergent properties that arise from the interplay of technology, individuals, and organisations at various levels of system abstraction. The first step of this type of analysis is the creation of the Actor Map. It is the Actor Map that this article focuses on.

The Actor Map. To construct the Actor Map for the UK road transport system recourse was first made to the existing literature. Work from Salmon et al. (2013), Scott-Parker et al. (2015), Newnam and Goode (2015), and Parnell et al. (2017) provided the starting point; however, although all provide Actor Maps of the road transport system, they each focus on a particular aspect (e.g., distraction, road-rail intersections, road freight, young drivers). It was therefore necessary to expand the document review beyond the academic literature. As habitual road users and road safety researchers and practitioners ourselves, we were able to use our own experience of the road system to guide initial document searches. Government and local council documents and statistical releases, as well as charity and non-governmental organisation websites represented the primary information sources, alongside the UK’s parliament website (parliament.uk). Informal consultations with other members of the University of Southampton’s Transportation Research Group served to supplement the model, and further additions and alterations were made following informal conversations with subject matter experts in the motor industry, public health, emergency medical response, and emergency police response domains. Several iterations were performed, resulting in the final Actor Map that can be seen in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. Actor Map of the road transport system, with coloured dots indicating the relevant road safety perspective described above.

The top most levels of Figure 1 show the International Committees (e.g. European Union, International Organisation for Standardisation) and National Committees (e.g. Transport Select Committee); they are independent of the government and oversee/review policies and directives. These are followed by Central Government, i.e., the departments that run the country and define its laws and policies (e.g. Department for Transport, Department of Health, etc.). In the Regulators and Associations level are the actors concerned with the implementation and management of mandates passed down by higher government (e.g., Highways England, Police, National Health Service), and the associations that give voice to business and industry (e.g. Institution of Civil Engineers, Association of British Insurers). Industry and Local Government, the next level down, includes actors with more narrowly defined remits (e.g. specific companies, such as Taxi Companies, Haulage and Delivery Companies) as well as those that work more locally under the national bodies that sit above them (e.g. Local Fire & Rescue, Local Police Constabularies, Traffic Control Centres). The specific functions and services of these actors are typically implemented by those in the level below, the Resource Providers (e.g. Traffic Police, Emergency Service Workers, Driving Instructors), while End Users represent the potential users of the system (e.g. car drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, commercial vehicle drivers, etc.). The lowest level, Environment and Equipment, displays the physical components that make up the system, for example roads and bridges, vehicles, signage, and traffic calming devices.

The Actor Map in Figure 1 has been embellished with a number of colourful dots. These indicate the different perspectives through which specific actors can influence road safety, in terms of six of the seven ‘E’s listed above (i.e., excluding ‘ergonomics’, the umbrella term for our approach). For example, the Department for Health affects road safety through its effect on emergency services (hence has a lilac dot), while the British Standards Institute affects it through describing and enforcing engineering standards in consumer products (hence its yellow and blue dots).

Economics is the avenue through which the highest number of system actors influence road safety. Of those identified, 45 have been assigned this category. This is perhaps reflective of the fact that economic pressure is the often most influential constraint in our highly capitalistic society. All business and industry works to economic targets, hence all public transportation companies (which, in the UK, are all privately owned), delivery companies, and any companies selling vehicles or equipment will all have to exist in a competitive, economically-driven market. This is in addition to the use of economics as punishments (e.g. parking fines, speeding fines), and the need for economic policies that support road safety. With 27 actors influencing road safety through emergency response, this is the perspective that involves the least number of actors identified.

It is important to point out that the categorisations we have assigned do not represent the full gamut of activities performed by each actor, rather only those specifically related to road safety. Admittedly, this categorisation carries with it a certain degree of subjectivity, with some actors more obviously belonging certain categories than others, and some more obviously not belonging to certain categories. For example, it is fairly clear that the Department for Education’s role in road safety centres around the education of children in schools, having little to do with, for example, road building or design, the enforcement of laws, or the provision of emergency response services. Other actors, however, are less easily defined, for example Parish Councils. These represent the lowest tier of local government, and are found in villages and very small towns in the UK. The have a range of powers, and here we have categorised them under engineering (as they can affect local road infrastructure policy), enforcement (as they are influential in speed limit setting and speed camera placement), and in economics (due to their impact on local fund allocation, spending decisions, and tax raising). One could also argue, however, that they are able to affect road safety through education (through, for example, organising villages fêtes or school fairs where road safety is championed) and even emergency response, insofar as they could have a voice in decision-making processes for local health services.

We admit that in this way the categorisation used in Figure 1 is open to discussion. It is not our aim, however, to be prescriptive, rather to highlight the high level of complexity inherent to the road transport system. Indeed, there are actors identified in Figure 1 that influence road safety in ways not captured in the six ‘E’s described above. In particular, the observant reader will notice that there are two nodes (other than those in the lower two levels) that have not been assigned a coloured dot at all, and that have dotted (rather than solid) outlines; ‘Rail Delivery Group’ and ‘Network Rail’. This is because their effect on road safety is somewhat indirect. A well-managed rail system that is organised, clean, good value, and appealing to users will attract people away from their cars and onto the train. This can also be said for road public transport. In this way, the public transport industry, including the rail system, affect road safety; they play a role in reducing traffic volumes, one of the factors most affecting on-road fatality rates (e.g. Ahangari et al. 2017). Such an effect is not captured by our colour coding.

Conclusions and Future Work

The road transport picture is highly complex when taken as a whole, as we have attempted to do here. Of course, with increasing breadth one must sacrifice depth (there exist whole bodies of literature devoted to single components of the model presented above); however, it is important to bear in mind that in an interconnected sociotechnical system successful strategies and interventions not only provide benefit in one domain, but across a whole raft of them. The challenge is great, but the opportunity equally so. Moreover, the road safety challenge is far greater in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) than it is in the UK. The analysis above presents the first step in the Socio Technical Approach to Road Safety (STARS) project, an undertaking of the National Institute for Health Research’s newly formed Global Health Research Group in Road Safety. In addition to UK researchers, the project involves partners in Bangladesh, China, Kenya, and Vietnam. The approach we have applied to analysing the UK system will also be applied in all project partner contexts such that consistent, structured comparisons can be made. This will allow us to recommend interventions, couched in one or more of the ‘E’s presented above, in a way consistent with the sociotechnical systems philosophy.

Funding statement and disclaimer

This research was commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research using Official Development Assistance (ODA) funding. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health and Social Care.

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