Vision zero: How it all started

Book chapter, 2022

This is a presentation of how I remember the first steps of Vision Zero, the Swedish reorientation of traffic safety policy that took place from the mid-1990s and onwards. It is not an objective text that would be impossible to write as one of the initiators of the policy change. But it brings up some of the steps of the process and presents some hypotheses on how policy change might happen. It is claimed that there was no planned process, not even an ideology or well-developed idea, behind VZ from the very beginning. But there were opportunities and events where one thing led to another. The most fundamental being the immediate acceptance from the Swedish Minister of Infrastructure back in January 1995. The most prominent ideas behind VZ are that firstly safety is a matter of how the providers of the road transport system design and build and manage the system. The second idea is that a professional provider cannot trade off the citizens' life and health for benefits to the society and its citizens. The underlying hypothesis is that tradition and road traffic rules for the road users have been used as an excuse for not undertaking necessary system changes and modifications. The users have always been blamed for crashes and its consequences by the legal system as well as general approach from the society. The last part of the paper reflects on what is necessary to do in the future to eradicate amateurism, populism, and trade-offs from the road traffic safety field. Maybe a "duty of care" legislation needs to be introduced, protecting the citizen from poor design and operations.