TITLE:
Protecting Legal and Illegal Voluntary On-Road Collectors
AUTHORS:
Kenn Beer, Tom Bowrey, Tom Beer
KEYWORDS:
Harm Reduction, Safe System, On-Road Activities, Road Safety
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Safety Science and Technology,
Vol.11 No.1,
March
22,
2021
ABSTRACT: The health community uses a harm reduction model that deals with harm reduction at four levels: conceptual, practical, policy, and programmatic. The road safety community has adopted the Safe System as their harm reduction model. The Safe System is underpinned by the key principles: people make mistakes, the human body has limited biomechanical tolerance, there is a shared responsibility for creating a safer system and we aspire for zero death and serious injury in transport. The interacting elements/levers to achieve these principles are road and roadsides (infrastructure), safe people, safe vehicles,and safe speeds. Using on-road collectors as a specific example, the relationship between the health-based harm reduction model and the Safe System reveals that the Safe System assumes the conceptual, practical and policy levels to be pre-determined, and thus restricts itself to the programmatic level of the health-based harm reduction model.