Miles away or just around the corner? Systems thinking in road safety research and practice.

The facts around current and projected levels of road trauma eed little introduction: in 2012 road injury was the ninth leadng cause of worldwide deaths (WHO, 2014) and it is estimated hat by 2030 it will be the fifth (WHO, 2009). Its presence in the orld Health Organisation’s top ten causes of death gives a clear ndication of the scale of the problem: currently road injury stands lone within this list as the only non-disease-related issue. The nescapable truth is that road transport systems kill people on a cale that is comparable to cancers, cardiovascular disease, and espiratory diseases. There is no doubt that significant progress has been made y the road safety community in our attempts to reduce road rauma. There are numerous success stories and countless lives ave been saved through many forms of intervention. It is indisutable that in most areas roads are now the safest they have ever een. Recent paradigm shifts in the approach to road safety, such as he Swedish Vision Zero and Dutch Sustainable Safety approaches see Johansson, 2009; Wegman et al., 2008), have had a signifcant impact. Despite this, we are still faced with unacceptable evels of road trauma that result from problems that have so far roved resistant to interventions, or where the impact of successful nterventions is beginning to plateau. As evidenced by the figres mentioned above, our road systems still kill and injure people n a regular basis. Worse still, in some lower and middle-income ountries the road toll is increasing. At best, this suggests that past pproaches to reducing road trauma may have reached their limit n terms of their effectiveness. At worst, it suggests that the global esponse to road trauma is now failing. As road safety practitioners and researchers we appear to be aced with a stark choice in terms of how we continue to purue improvements in road safety. Do we continue with previously uccessful approaches and accept that only small, incremental mprovements may be achieved? Or is a new paradigm shift needed o facilitate greater road safety gains? The impetus for this special ssue was derived from these authors’ belief that the latter option s now the most viable (Salmon and Lenné, 2009; Salmon et al., 012). It is our contention (and others’ e.g. Johnston et al., 2014; arsson et al., 2010; Read et al., 2013) that a new approach is needed f further significant reductions in road trauma are to be realised. uch an approach is needed to deal with the longstanding issues hat continue to resist current interventions, such as collisions at