Customer Reviews

Traffic Safety

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My field of expertise is driver performance and traffic safety, and as a specialist in this field I can strongly recommend this excellent book. Leonard Evans is widely recognized as the world expert in this area, as far as the basic physics and research data on traffic safety issues are concerned. I bumped into him at the recent 2005 SAE meeting and told him I thought his new book was even better than his first (which was great as it was) -- and he replied "Of course it is better, I have had 10 more years to study the problem." Seriously though, his first chapter is available from hist website http://www.scienceservingsociety.com, and it alone will improve your whole attitude, if you are working in or interested in the area of traffic safety, and whet your appetite for the rest of the book. Note that this book does not have the usual avenues that large book companies have for widespread announcements and distribution, and its important messages should be given widespread attention in my opinion, so I would recommend you order it and let others know about it if you liked it as much as I did.

Leonard Evans has put into straightforward and easily understandable terms the reasons why traffic crashes are the most frequent cause of traumatic death in first world societies. His ways of turning problems inside out and examining real causes while identifying confounders helps turn even the casual reader into something of an expert in traffic safety.

This is one truly wonderful book by one of the world's safety pioneers, and one of the most brilliant minds in traffic safety today.

On a 10-point scale, I rate the quality and veracity of the data at 9.5 to 10, and the quality of the writing at 9 to 10.

Dr. Evans lucidly draws and thoroughly supports some very cogent and important conclusions, e.g., the US has placed far too much emphasis on making cars into crash-survival cells-assuming that a crash is inevitable-and not nearly enough on preventing crashes in the first place. While many of his suggestions for remedying this have significant merit and warrant careful consideration by the regulatory community, Evans does make some suggestions that may have theoretical merit, but are probably impractical and/or impracticable in the real world, e.g., mandatory speed governors on all vehicles.

Evans also does an excellent job of soundly and robustly documenting and supporting his opinions, e.g., the auto safety rubric in the US places doctors, lawyers and politicians in charge of policies that should instead be administered by engineers. He skillfully and incisively excoriates a regulatory system gone horribly wrong without sounding as though he's hysterically pushing conspiracy theory or a self-serving agenda (cf. Ralph Nader).

Evans' comparative analysis of the results of various countries' overall traffic and road safety regulation schema is enlightening, educational and-for those of us in North America-alarming.

On September 11th, 2001 about as many people died in the world in traffic as died in the terrorist attacks on America. More than a million people are killed on the world's roads each year. Leonard Evans provides a superb overview of the most important scientific findings in the field of traffic safety. (Most people in the US think traffic safety is about crash tests, but the truth is very different!)

The writing is lively and clear. There are tables and graphs throughout the book illustrating key data and principles. The early chapters cover the fundamentals of traffic safety. Later chapters build on this to analyze controversial subjects such as the dangers of SUVs, older drivers, and airbags. The heart of the book is the last two chapters analyzing the tragic mistakes that have been made in US traffic safety policy, why they happened, and a proposal for a more rational traffic safety policy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a fascination read on an important subject that receives too little attention. It should be required reading for anyone in the field or involved in traffic safety policy.

This wonderful book--always by my side-- is essential reading for those who want to know what to do about the US's dismal failure to reduce its road death toll in the last decade. The centerpiece of the book is an angry chapter in which Evans asks why the US has not introduced speed camera networks which reduced deaths in absolute numbers fell by 40-50% in Australia, the UK and France. Evans applies models derived from Newtonian physics, which relate mass, velocity and kinetic energy, to assess the proportional contributrion of an array of countermeasures for reducing road deaths and injuries. He comes to some conclusions which shake the groupthink Ptolemaic mindset of US injury prevention specialists, a tribe publishing more and more about interventions which yield less and less. The book contains a wealth of information, recommendations and insights on alcohol, seat belts, air bags, vehicle safety standards and much more in road safety, and demonstrates a glittering ability to cut through a lot of nonsense and get to the core of the issue on what works and what doesn't. Again a must read. A detailed review is available by this reviewer in Israel Med Assoc Journal. (IMAJ: 2005: 7: 62-3) Elihu D Richter MD, MPH Hebrew University

Similar to the earlier text by the same author, this book is well written and easy to understand. Besides the inclusion of newer research data, this book also has a stronger emphasis on public policies discussions that are supported by the data presented. These discussions are insightful and thought provoking. An excellent book that should be read by all road safety professionals.

I recommend this book highly. It answers just about every traffic safety question. While written mainly for safety professionals, I found it fascinating, very readable and so clearly written it was easy to understand even though I am not professionally involved.

I enjoyed the author's humor and the way he gets right to the core of an issue. He gives suggestions not only for better traffic policies but also for making yourself safer on the roads.

The author is not only an academic expert on the subject - but he himself has never been involved in a traffic accident. Some may think that lucky, but I'm fairly sure the more knowledge you gain on this subject, the luckier you become....

Whether you are a traffic safety researcher, professional or advocate, Leonard Evans' new book on the subject is essential reading. Dr. Evans draws both upon his own and other reputed scientists in the field to present baseline information to researchers across the comprehensive sub-disciplines of traffic safety. The facts are not shrouded in scien-tific jargon, however, and will be understandable to non-academics and decision-makers alike. In the closing chapters, Dr. Evans fearlessly moves from the scientific facts to the personalities that shape the commonly held paradigms in the traffic safety community. He provides concrete examples of the reasons that current efforts have fallen short, and he clearly demonstrates that the only way to make definitive progress in traffic safety is to provide a hard linkage between the applied countermeasures and the root causes of the problem itself.

David B. Brown, PhD, P.E.
Director of Development
CARE Research and Development Laboratory
The University of Alabama
brown@cs.ua.edu

A MASTERLY AND COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF THE FIELD OF TRAFFIC SAFETY BY THE GLOBAL EXPERT. AS EXPECTED FROM THIS AUTHOR, THE LUCID AND WITTY STYLE MAKES READING THIS BOOK A VERITABLE PLEASURE.