PART's Plans and Goals
Parents Against Road Tragedies [PART] will always strive to utilize global best practice in all of its tasks. In other words, if we can apply either empirical research or empirical practice to our efforts then we shall do so, but allowing for the fact that techniques from one country may need adaptation to meet cultural or legal differences elsewhere.
One specific aim of PART is to attract people or groups who have little practical experience or expert knowledge of road safety but who feel driven to do something significant to help reduce crashes. Typically, such people are bereaved parents who are desperate to start programs intended to prevent other parents suffering similar grief due to further crashes. Unfortunately, however, some of these programs are potentially more harmful than good. (For example, setting up training courses to teach young drivers how to get out of a skid has been shown by research to likely end with the trainees not only having more crashes afterwards than youths who do not get such training, but those crashes are also likely to occur at higher speeds and therefore be even more dangerous. [More info' here.] Similarly, teaching drivers how to swerve left or right at the last moment, in order to hopefully avoid a collision, is wrought with danger when compared to teaching those same people how to identify potential risk both sooner and much more effectively and thereby stay out of the danger zone rather than trying to escape by attempting risky maneuvers at the last moment. Practicing evasive swerve techniques on a deserted airfield or parking lot is an entirely different matter to doing evasion swerves on a busy road, with other vehicles and perhaps pedestrians, bicyclists, trees or ditches around you.)
Apart from (1.) seeking much more focus on none-alcohol-related road deaths, PART's initial aims are as follows:
To encourage and facilitate major improvements to the currently inadequate standards of information and mandatory training that are provided for the vast majority of new drivers. For example, in the USA Graduated Driver Licensing [GDL] is achieving positive results but is still based on extraordinarily inadequate and dangerously inaccurate information in state drivers' manuals.
Much is being discussed in academic circles, at present, about developing a stronger overall road safety culture. From this, it could be argued that a grassroots effort to significantly improve the typical behavior of drivers is inescapably important.
Therefore:
Educating the public in road safety matters consistently, and from an early age – certainly long before individuals reach the age at which they may lawfully start to drive. ["Education" in the context of road safety is something that certain individuals and organizations in the USA, for example, claim to be ineffective. In other developed nations that have significantly lower (i.e. better) per capita and per distance traveled rates of road deaths, however, such education has long been important in the overall safety regime. PART's position is that improved standards of safety education would be equally effective in America.]
Such public education should also highlight the global situation and thereby draw attention to events such as the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims (on the third Sunday in November, each year - see below).
To encourage means by which law enforcement officers are reliably able to identify every vehicle that is being driven by "student," "learner," "probationary," or otherwise inexperienced drivers (e.g. using conspicuous "S"/"L" and "P" plates as a mandatory measure) so that compliance and safety may both be actively monitored.
The standard of driving by law enforcement officers is often a concern in its own right. While the figure is higher than that stated by NHTSA, the Pursuit Watch organization claims that over 400 people are killed in crashes involving law enforcement vehicles in the USA alone, each year. PART certainly does not support a blanket ban on police pursuits, rather it supports the policy of the Police Driving organization that law enforcement budgets for driver training should be massively increased, compared to what is currently almost always gross under-funding.
Apart from a clear duty to protect lives, rather than risk them, law enforcement officers undeniably have an unwritten, additional responsibility relating to Education (one of the fundamental "Three E's" of road safety) and that is in setting a good "Example". One cannot expect young drivers – or any drivers, for that matter – to respect the law if they frequently witness law enforcement drivers breaking the laws with impunity when no good reason exists.
Two aspects of "Enforcement" that may be said to require additional attention are:
achieving a balanced approach to the whole range of infractions that can and do cause danger, rather than having any disproportionate emphasis on any one factor, such as speeding;
increasing the protection – by both adequate conspicuity and long-range signage – for crash scenes and all emergency services personnel working at roadside incidents.
Helping to educate politicians to the bigger picture of traffic safety issues, at local, state and national levels. This should unfailingly include suitable activities for the World Day or Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims (see above), each year.
One key political point that frequently goes unmentioned in the USA is the fact that road crashes and road casualties cost US society in excess of $230 billion, annually. Indeed, in most countries, the cost to society is at least 1.5 to 2% of GDP.
To help motivate a change in US Government policy, to the effect that simply reducing the rate of road deaths as measured by distance traveled (known in America as the "VMT rate") is emphatically not an adequate goal, especially in light of the recent dramatic lowering of the 2008 goal from 1.00 deaths per 100,000,000 miles to 1.36, relative to a 2002 starting point of 1.51. Raising the "acceptable" number of deaths by 36 percent rather than working to achieve the original target can hardly be seen as a good thing to do!
In the majority of developed countries, targets have been set to reduce the overall number of annual road deaths by either 40 percent or 50 percent, by either 2010 or 2012 (with these variables dictated by existing standards in each such country). While the USA is certainly both rich enough and clever enough to match these goals, it would appear that due to a lack of public knowledge of the facts, the political willpower is dramatically lacking. But here's the point: If the USA were to work on, say, a 40 percent cut in annual road deaths and casualties, success would mean more than 16,000 lives saved and more than one million fewer injuries each year. We can't match other countries' goals and successes because.... why?
Given the extraordinary efforts and achievements of Mothers Against Drunk Driving [MADD], there is no intention for PART to in any way duplicate their work. As a matter of position, however, PART supports the conclusion reached by the World Medical Association [WMA], in 1992, that the maximum blood-alcohol concentration [BAC] limit in drivers should be no higher than 0.05 percent in any country. [Source]
To identify and, in the longer term, finance research in areas that may be more relevant or apparent to frontline safety workers (i.e. law enforcement, fire and paramedic personnel) than they might be to academics who have little or no practical experience in such matters. Examples of this might be crash-scene protection and officer/vehicle conspicuity, as mentioned in a different context, above.
To involve young people as meaningful participants in the safety machine, in a manner that they find rewarding.