Factors Controlling Traffic Crashes

Based on traffic safety literature, the author's judgment, and traffic accident data, this article identifies the most important factors controlling traffic crashes. Using a hierarchical schema, the article presents these factors in the following order of importance: human infrastructure factors of individual behavior-specifically, social norms and closed-loop compensatory feedback control-and legislative intervention, and engineering infrastructure factors involving roadways, traffic control systems, and vehicles. Although social norms are found to provide the greatest opportunity for reducing traffic crash rates, the author stresses that several factors explain changes in traffic crash data, and considers attempts to explain such data using only one factor to be, at best gross oversimplification.

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