•Perceptions of AV safety were surveyed across 41,932 individuals in 51 countries.•Young, high-income, employed, and highly-educated males are the most optimistic about AV safety.•Western European ...countries are aware of AV technology, but are pessimistic about its safety.•Conversely, developing countries in Asia are the most optimistic about current and future AV safety.•AV safety optimism in risk-taking individuals and developing countries may reduce global disparity in road safety.
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are envisioned to reduce road fatalities by switching control of safety-critical tasks from humans to machines. Realizing safety benefits on the ground depends on technological advancement as well as the scale and rate of AV adoption, which are influenced by public perceptions. Employing multilevel structural equation modeling, this paper explores differences in perceptions of AV safety across 33,958 individuals in 51 countries. At the individual level, young males report higher perceptions of current AV safety and predict fewer years until AVs are safe enough for them to use. Since young males are more likely to undertake risky driving behavior, their positivity towards AV safety could lead to more rapid manifestations of safety benefits. Urban, fully employed individuals with higher incomes and education levels also report fewer years until AVs are safe to use. The multilevel model identifies country-level effects after controlling for individual characteristics. Developed countries with greater motorization rates and lower road death rates tend to have greater awareness of AVs but are more pessimistic about their present and future safety. Individuals in developing countries that face greater road safety challenges, particularly involving 2- and 3-wheeled vehicles, predict fewer years until AVs will be safe enough for them to use. Higher AV safety perception among the most risk-taking road users and in developing countries coincide with sociodemographic groups and geographic areas facing the greatest road safety challenges and most in need of improvement, highlighting a potential opportunity to reduce the global disparity in road safety.
In their first book, Safety Management Systems in Aviation, Stolzer, Halford, and Goglia provided a strong theoretical framework for SMS, along with a brief discourse on SMS implementation. This ...follow-up book provides a very brief overview of SMS and offers significant guidance and best practices on implementing SMS programs. Very specific guidance is provided by industry experts from government, industry, academia, and consulting, who share their invaluable insights from first-hand experience of all aspects of effective SMS programs.
AbstractSafety leading indicators are measures of the safety management system that correlate with injury rates. The literature on the topic is dispersed and equivocal in the definition, ...categorization, and measurement of candidate indicators, which makes validation and replication difficult. This study includes a comprehensive review of safety leading indicator research, offers a distinction between leading indicators and other methods of safety prediction, and defines a clear method for distinguishing between active and passive indicators. By applying these definitions and leveraging empirical data, a statistical meta-analysis was performed to compute the relative effect sizes and significance for all salient indicators. Although active leading indicator research is rare and relatively recent, the meta-analysis indicates that inspections and pretask safety meetings correlate strongly with near-term project safety performance. Passive leading indicator research is relatively common and has been conducted for several decades. The results of the meta-analysis indicate that implementing safety recordkeeping, safety resource, staffing for safety, owner involvement, safety training/orientation, personal protective equipment, safety incentives program, and safety inspections and observation each improves long-term safety performance. The findings validate suspected leading indicators and serve as a first step toward standardization. Practitioners may use the findings to justify and target resource expenditures using pervasive scientific evidence.
Over the last decade, the electric vehicle (EV) has significantly changed the car industry globally, driven by the fast development of Li-ion battery technology. However, the fire risk and hazard ...associated with this type of high-energy battery has become a major safety concern for EVs. This review focuses on the latest fire-safety issues of EVs related to thermal runaway and fire in Li-ion batteries. Thermal runaway or fire can occur as a result of extreme abuse conditions that may be the result of the faulty operation or traffic accidents. Failure of the battery may then be accompanied by the release of toxic gas, fire, jet flames, and explosion. This paper is devoted to reviewing the battery fire in battery EVs, hybrid EVs, and electric buses to provide a qualitative understanding of the fire risk and hazards associated with battery powered EVs. In addition, important battery fire characteristics involved in various EV fire scenarios, obtained through testing, are analysed. The tested peak heat release rate (PHHR in MW) varies with the energy capacity of LIBs (
E
B
in Wh) crossing different scales as
P
H
R
R
=
2
E
B
0.6
. For the full-scale EV fire test, limited data have revealed that the heat release and hazard of an EV fire are comparable to that of a fossil-fuelled vehicle fire. Once the onboard battery involved in fire, there is a greater difficulty in suppressing EV fires, because the burning battery pack inside is inaccessible to externally applied suppressant and can re-ignite without sufficient cooling. As a result, an excessive amount of suppression agent is needed to cool the battery, extinguish the fire, and prevent reignition. By addressing these concerns, this review aims to aid researchers and industries working with batteries, EVs and fire safety engineering, to encourage active research collaborations, and attract future research and development on improving the overall safety of future EVs. Only then will society achieve the same comfort level for EVs as they have for conventional vehicles.
A new approach to safety, based on systems thinking, that is more effective, less costly, and easier to use than current techniques.
Engineering has experienced a technological revolution, but the ...basic engineering techniques applied in safety and reliability engineering, created in a simpler, analog world, have changed very little over the years. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy Leveson proposes a new approach to safety—more suited to today's complex, sociotechnical, software-intensive world—based on modern systems thinking and systems theory. Revisiting and updating ideas pioneered by 1950s aerospace engineers in their System Safety concept, and testing her new model extensively on real-world examples, Leveson has created a new approach to safety that is more effective, less expensive, and easier to use than current techniques.
Arguing that traditional models of causality are inadequate, Leveson presents a new, extended model of causation (Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, or STAMP), then shows how the new model can be used to create techniques for system safety engineering, including accident analysis, hazard analysis, system design, safety in operations, and management of safety-critical systems. She applies the new techniques to real-world events including the friendly-fire loss of a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter in the first Gulf War; the Vioxx recall; the U.S. Navy SUBSAFE program; and the bacterial contamination of a public water supply in a Canadian town. Leveson's approach is relevant even beyond safety engineering, offering techniques for “reengineering” any large sociotechnical system to improve safety and manage risk.
With the potential to save nearly 30 000 lives per year in the United States, autonomous vehicles portend the most significant advance in auto safety history by shifting the focus from minimization ...of postcrash injury to collision prevention. I have delineated the important public health implications of autonomous vehicles and provided a brief analysis of a critically important ethical issue inherent in autonomous vehicle design. The broad expertise, ethical principles, and values of public health should be brought to bear on a wide range of issues pertaining to autonomous vehicles.
"This book describes research on safety-related decision-making by operations supervisory personnel in three different high-hazard industries, and features a case study illustrating each: a chemical ...plant, a nuclear power station and an air-navigation service provider. The focus of this research is unique: those who supervise the frontline personnel and essentially provide the organizational link between senior management and minute-by-minute system operations"--Provided by publisher.
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