Safe System

The Safe System & Vision Zero

The Safe System is the overarching framework for reducing and ultimately eliminating death and serious injury on our roads. It supports the long-term Vision Zero objective by recognising that road trauma is not inevitable and that risk must be managed across the whole road transport system.

At its core, the Safe System accepts that people make mistakes and that the human body has limited tolerance to crash forces. Roads, roadsides, speeds, vehicles, people and post-crash response must therefore work together so that when errors occur, they do not result in fatal or serious injury outcomes.

Road trauma has significant personal, social and economic impacts. Fatalities and serious injuries affect families, communities, workplaces and health systems, and place a broader cost on society. Understanding this scale of harm reinforces why road safety must be treated as a critical public policy, planning, design and operational issue.