Reimagining the Travel Safety Paradigm Through a Pyramid

Transportation systems play a huge role in how we get around. Unfortunately, this comes with a downside: an epidemic of traffic injuries and death. To get ahead of this, Prof. Kari Watkins and collaborators at Georgia Tech and the University of Minnesota have proposed a transformative new framework for traffic safety—the Safe Systems Pyramid. The Safe Systems Pyramid emphasizes the importance of a focus on improving the systems that govern our transportation infrastructure over trying to modify individual behavior.

The Safe Systems Pyramid reimagines the so-called “E’s” framework—engineering, enforcement, and education—to focus on the factors that can have the biggest impact on public health. Read more about the Safe Systems Pyramid in the paper and in this feature from Governing Magazine and listen to the a discussion on the Streets Blog Talking Headways podcast.