Experiences and Challenges in Fatality Reduction on Polish Roads

Abstract

According to the UN, road safety is the key to achieving sustainable development goals, yet the complexity of how road accidents happen makes this a difficult challenge leaving many countries struggling with the problem. For years, Poland has infamously been one of the EU’s top countries for road-accident fatality rates. Despite that, it has made significant progress in the last thirty years with a fatality reduction of more than 60%. A number of factors have contributed to this result: improving the socioeconomic situation, improving road safety measures, changing road user behaviour and changing national road safety programmes. This article presents Poland’s approach to road safety and, in particular, Vision Zero, adopted in 2005. Poland’s road safety changed over the years as the country learned from its successes and failures. Tools for forecasting fatalities were developed and used to identify the main factors that have helped to reduce deaths. An assessment was conducted on how Poland could implement Vision Zero until 2050 under different road safety scenarios. It was found that in order to achieve the EU’s goal for 2030, Poland must reduce fatalities to 1200. While it is an ambitious goal, it is also an important step towards zero fatalities in 2050.

Evaluation of the Road Policy in the Light of Vision Zero in Jaworzno, Poland

“…At this point, it has to be mentioned that the Vision Zero policy is considered a holistic approach [52] aiming to improve road safety by sharing the responsibility for the safety issues among various entities, such as public authorities, infrastructure designers, car manufacturers or educational institutions. In comparison to the holistic approach, the traditional approach is narrower and does not include the various arrays of entities with shared responsibilities for the road safety but is centred around the user being the cause and thus responsible for the road accidents [40] and individual measurements which do not necessarily have to be integrated into complex approach are being implemented in a reaction to specific road safety issues.…”

“…What is however interesting, is that the road safety policy labelled by the public authorities in Jaworzno as Vision Zero is in the clash between the holistic and traditional approaches, as the rationale in Jaworzno is also driven by the fact, that mankind is not evolutionarily adapted to driving vehicles [61], as is shown later. Thus, the inspiration for this study is the use of the VZ as an interpretative framework to examine how this specific Vision Zero has entered the local debate and is being executed [57] and to contribute to the ongoing polish Vision Zero debate [52,60].…”

“…In total, Poland since 1996 has had four National Road Safety Programmes (PBRD-Program Bezpieczeństwa Ruchu Drogowego), and while the first two documents, from 1996 and 2000, do not adopt a general system approach [52], the two subsequent documents, discussed below, do adopt VZ as the main assumption. The two programmes are considered to be the beginning of Poland's systemic approach to road safety [52].…”

Decreasing Trends in Road Traffic Mortality in Poland: A Twenty-Year Analysis

“…Those improvements evolve around modernizing the roads, penalizing for breaking a traffic law, novel regulations of technical condition of automobiles and educating road users [ 13 ]. A number of systematic actions were carried out, mainly the development and implementation of a sectoral National Road Safety Improvement Program—GAMBIT National Roads and the information campaign Roads of Trust [ 14 ].…”

Method to Assess and Enhance Vulnerable Road User Safety during Impact Loading

“…Thus, higher than average shares are reported in the Netherlands and Denmark. On the other hand, the high share of pedestrian fatalities distinguishes relatively new EU member states such as Romania, Latvia, Poland and Lithuania where pedestrians contribute to more than 30% of all road deaths [9,10]. However, an interesting correlation forms as we compare the road safety level in various countries (fatality rate per million inhabitants) with the pedestrian deaths on roads.…”