Citation

Tingvall C. Traffic Saf. Res. 2021; 1: e1.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Lund University - TSR International)

DOI

10.55329/pvkj7520

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Just over a year ago, the 3rd Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety was held in Stockholm (Road Safety Conference, 2020). Since then, the world has experienced a pandemic that hit us all, wherever we are, whatever we do. We have learnt new things, we have understood complex interactions and hopefully we will be handling the next pandemic better. It will be the role of the scientific community to explore, build and test new hypotheses, discuss and propose actions and scope for further research. We know that our processes for building new knowledge by challenging the current wisdom, theory and axioms is working and leads us to the next steps.

Road traffic crashes with serious injuries and deaths has been a pandemic for more than 100 years, constantly ongoing. Our virus is kinetic energy—invisible, mysterious and equally hard to explain to citizens without using true knowledge like the laws of physics. Intuition, gut feeling and populism are our enemies despite a good understanding among researchers.

The ingredients of a successful prevention have been demonstrated during the pandemic. The development of vaccine, treatment and lowering the risk of outbreaks has been extremely fast, and not without real success. But it will probably take many years to understand the most effective components of a society that is well prepared to meet the next pandemic. Is it preparedness to response with lockdowns? Or is it the way the health care for the elderly is organized? Or how quickly new vaccines can be developed? Or is it everything together, in a process where every step is needed to stop the pandemic? ...

Language: en