Pickleloaf.com : Books : Traffic Safety


Books : Traffic Safety In association with Amazon.com Rating: - Evans takes on the holy cows and golden calves 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 Rating: - The Definitive Traffic Safety Reference 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 Rating: - Essential reading for researchers, clinicians, and engineers 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. Rating: - Excellent book, strongly recommended 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. Rating: - Insightful & Thought Provoking 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.