(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 453: Bringing Public Health to Traffic Safety

This week we’re joined by UC Davis professor Kari Watkins and epidemiologist Dave Ederer to talk about their paper The Safe Systems Pyramid: A New Framework for Traffic Safety. We talk about the connections between transportation and public health and how it allows us to think differently about transportation safety.

Find David’s full dissertation on Georgia Tech’s website.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood (1m 40s):
Kari Watkins and David Ederer, welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast

Dave Ederer (2m 6s):
Thank you. Thanks Jeff. Excited to be here. Awesome.

Jeff Wood (2m 8s):
Well, we’re glad you all are here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and Carrie, we’ve had you on the show before, so Dave, maybe we could start with you.

Dave Ederer (2m 15s):
Yeah, my name’s Dave Ederer. I’m transportation engineer, public health professional, somewhere in between. It depends on who I’m talking to. And I actually did my PhD in Carrie’s lab at Georgia Tech in Transportation Systems engineering. But I spent a lot of my career kind of jumping back and forth between public health and transportation. I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about that today.

Jeff Wood (2m 38s):
Absolutely. I, I also wanna know like how did you get into transportation? Like what was your first introduction to thinking that it’s a topic that you really cared about?

Dave Ederer (2m 44s):
Yeah, it’s, it’s an interesting question and it maybe an interesting story. They’re

Jeff Wood (2m 49s):
Always interesting, right?

Dave Ederer (2m 51s):
So I, I don’t even know how much we’ve went into detail about this. I used to research multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and I was really interested in international health and trying to find ways to get an international health job. And at some point in between, I met the person who I would later to marry. So my wife is in medical school in Atlanta, being global health Atlanta, c D C. So I, I got my first job out of grad school after finishing my M P H, so that’s a master of public health degree. I got at C D C and it was in transportation safety. And I, I was starting at zero. I mean, I barely knew anything about the field, didn’t take an injury epidemiology course.

Dave Ederer (3m 35s):
So this job was working on global road safety and at the time we had a director who had something called winnable battles. And these were public health issues where we could make a difference, where we could actually win and save lives. And one of them was transportation safety. And so my job was, it’s kind of like a bag carrier. I staffed a lot of important people to different meetings and give them talking points and occasionally write papers. And that’s where I got started. And I just, I fell in love immediately. Like it was, I knew this was what I wanted to work on for the rest of my life. And then how I got into transportation with another story. I was constantly sitting in these rooms like literally at the un, the W H O asking how we fix this, how do we, you know, this is a winnable battle, how do we win?

Dave Ederer (4m 20s):
And a lot of the times the answer was, well, you gotta talk to the engineers. And so I was asked, where are the engineers I talked to? And they were never there. And so I decided I was gonna be there and I was gonna be the engineer that that worked on this. And fortunately Carrie took me on as a student and now we’re here, I suppose.

Jeff Wood (4m 38s):
Nice. Well, we’re in a good spot, I think ’cause I’m excited to talk about the paper. Kari, can you tell folks a little bit about yourself for those who might not have listened to the last episode you were on?

Kari Watkins (4m 45s):
Sure. I’ve been in transportation for a long time. I was most recently a professor at Georgia Tech. That’s where I advised Dave for 11 years. And then I just took a new position about a year ago at the University of California Davis. For any of your listeners who don’t know, Davis is the most bikeable city in America. We have amazing infrastructure. It’s a dream come true to live in a place like this. And in addition, I do a lot of research in public transportation. We’re very close to the Bay area and we have this tiny little Transit system called Unitrans that is entirely student run.

Kari Watkins (5m 27s):
They only have a handful of full-time staff. And so for a transportation researcher interested in Bikeability and Transit, I’ve kind of come to my paradise where I get to play around a bunch with our local systems and and showcase them. So it’s on my way to retirement. Last 20 years of my career job, Davis is a great place to be for that.

Jeff Wood (5m 51s):
Awesome. And we can talk later about how new cities might form in close proximity to where you’re located. Oh geez.

Kari Watkins (5m 59s):
Okay. I I think that might be a no comment one.

Jeff Wood (6m 5s):
Fair enough. Well, so I wanted to have you all on to talk about your new paper, the Safe Systems, Pyramid A New Framework for Traffic Safety. And I wanted to start with kind of a simple question, at least I feel like it might be simple for you all that sets up the larger discussion, which is, you know, how is transportation currently impacting public health?

Dave Ederer (6m 20s):
Oh my goodness. How, how is it not impacting public health? Right. The number one, first and foremost, more than 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic crashes. A lot of them are people walking, A lot of them are people cycling and thousands are children. So that, that is for me, that that’s what really brought me into the field actually, is understanding the size of this public health issue and how we don’t actually talk about it that way. You know, we, we always talk about other public health issues in reference to car crashes. They say, wow, that causes more deaths than car crashes in America every year. That’s the big one, right?

Dave Ederer (7m 1s):
And then we can talk about air quality. We’re increasingly seeing, you know, we know tailpipe emissions have, have an influence on respiratory health, but now we know that heavy particulate matter from tires can really influence our health. And then just in terms of physical activity and chronic disease, you know, we’ll talk about Dr. Frieden a little bit who had his Framework, but one thing he always said was, physical activity is the closest thing we have to a wonder drug we know that can improve our cardiovascular health. We’ve known that for 50 years, but now we have some really robust scientific evidence that shows it’s important for mental health, wellbeing, all sorts of things. But my opinion, transportation touches almost everything in health.

Kari Watkins (7m 45s):
I would just add Jeff, before Dave came to my lab and, and solidified all of these things that I was always at the periphery of in the world of public health, because I don’t have a background in that. So having him in my lab for a while and bringing that public health background in was fantastic. But even before that, I always used to use at the beginning of lectures where I talked about why bike ped infrastructure is important. I would use the c d C graph about the, the highest causes of death by age. And you can go through that and see, except for a drug epidemic that we’re now in the middle of that traffic safety deaths were the number one thing among all of these different ages.

Kari Watkins (8m 35s):
And then you get into these higher ages and it’s things like cancer, it’s things like heart disease and all of those stem from the exercise, the, the physical activity that Dave’s talking about. So I always felt like that was a nice way to bring home, especially among students when I teach, is, you know, they love this bubbly professor starts off talking about death in her first lecture. You know, what a literally morbid topic. But, but I mean, I think that that’s the best way to bring it home is like all of these things, like what we do in transportation is contributing to the number one causes of death across all age groups.

Jeff Wood (9m 15s):
Yeah. And, and I think that that’s really important because the most kind of intense intersection here is the traffic safety and, and deaths from collisions. And we’ve actually gotten them to change. And every time I say collision, my brain starts thinking accident. Right? And so we actually have that discussion too. This issue of injuries and deaths on roads is understood in different ways by different folks, right? So health experts are seeing these things differently as opposed to civil engineers. And so I wanna explore that a little bit and understand what the differences are between maybe a public health kind of look at these things and then also like what engineers see.

Dave Ederer (9m 47s):
Yeah. So I think it’s important to kind of clarify what public health is and does. And you know, we, we focus on the population level and we’re most interested in improving health for the entire population and ideally prevention, right? And that’s a little different than medicine. And so that distinction is important too. Like my wife is a physician, she sees an individual patient. It’s typically if I haven’t done my job right, like I wanna prevent that injury, I wanna prevent anyone from going to her ed. But she can only fix one problem at a time. In one person in public health, we’re thinking across society, how do we make sure that people aren’t getting severely injured and dying crashes?

Dave Ederer (10m 27s):
Engineers have, I don’t wanna say entirely different set of priorities because they, I do think engineers primary concern is safety, right? Transportation, engineers want to move people, but you know, it’s a binary variable they have to do so safely. And so that’s where the two have a mutual interest. Where it gets a little different is transportation engineers, they have to move people, right? Transportation is, we rarely move just to move. We have to get from A to B and that’s where the engineers come in and that, that’s really important. And we can talk about how that influences health too. But I’ll stop there. Maybe Carrie has more to say about that. I

Kari Watkins (11m 2s):
Would say the primary differences as an engineer, I’m the one who’s responsible for or responsible for teaching at least people who will be designing the roadway network, right? And so when the asphalt hits the ground, we’re the ones who are actually making sure that what’s happening out there is safe. And I think the public health professionals do have that wider perspective of looking at data across, across time, across locations. But in transportation, transportation, engineering, we’re the ones actually designing the facilities. And the crime of it is that we haven’t done that very well Over time.

Kari Watkins (11m 46s):
We’ve, we’ve had some surges where we made big gains in how we did that, but recently we’ve kind of fallen off the path and we’re not really designing for safety anymore. And that’s kind of where Dave and I were coming at it with the safe systems Pyramid.

Jeff Wood (12m 2s):
Yeah. And so one of the interesting things to me was the epidemiologic epidemiologic triad and the idea that the collision itself isn’t the cause of the collision. And I think that that really was the thing that hit me when I was reading the paper.

Dave Ederer (12m 16s):
Yeah, that’s a really important point in all of this is what is the pathology? What is the cause of the injury? Because that’s what we have to focus on. And that’s something that public health brings because that changes how we design and do things. And that goes back to, I think I read a little bit about it in the paper, you know, these three researchers to have in Gibson and Hadden who were thinking about it and thinking about kinetic energy as pathological. And once you see that distinction, I think it changes how you do things. So Hadden, who is a medical doctor and an epidemiologist, and the first nitsa administrator, as it turns out he compared it to tuberculosis.

Dave Ederer (12m 59s):
So tb, this is actually, you know, going back to the start of my career, you know, there’s different symptoms to TB like human wasting. So you know, people losing a lot of weight and the term is quite descriptive. You can try to solve human wasting. There’s different things you might do to try to solve that. Like give people lots of food. But you know, if you think causally, what is causing that human wasting? Well you might say they’re losing weight, right? But in reality, the cause of that is might go bacteria in tuberculosis and it infecting the human body. So you have to think about preventing that infection in the first place to solve human wasting. It’s the same idea. We have to think about preventing the transfer of kinetic energy to actually prevent injuries and deaths.

Dave Ederer (13m 40s):
We’ve primarily thought about crash prevention, which isn’t the same thing. It’s injury and death, right? We have to think about preventing injuries and death. And that’s, that’s actually where the light bulb turned on for me many, many years ago when I heard about Vision Zero and people were saying we actually have to prevent injuries and death crashes are important, but they aren’t nearly as important as human health.

Kari Watkins (14m 3s):
I would add on, I mean I think what Dave is saying is important, but part of the engineering aspect is going back to the root cause of what’s happening too. Like in the tuberculosis example, you know, they can treat this patient, but if they can eradicate the disease in the first place, then that’s great. And so I think in injury prevention, like Dave said, we’re worried about preventing the injury, preventing the death. So creating a system where if a crash were to occur that it’s not gonna be as as bad of a crash, right? That we can protect those people. But as we’ll get into with the Pyramid, there’s lots of ways that we can protect those people.

Kari Watkins (14m 43s):
Airbags and seat belts and things like that. But we don’t wanna get away from the fact that if we design the roadway differently than we could prevent the crash in the first place. Or even if the crash would occur, it would be such a minor crash. So it’s not just about creating, you know, giant vehicles that are gonna protect their own inhabit, I’ll call ’em inhabitants.

Jeff Wood (15m 9s):
They’re, I mean they’re kind of houses, right? So it feels

Kari Watkins (15m 11s):
Like a small country, right? When you see some of these vehicles, you know, it’s about creating a system where the energy between that vehicle and whatever it’s crashing into and all of those things matter and that we’re, we’re thinking about policies, we’re thinking about design, all of the, these aspects are vitally important. Not just a campaign to get us to a hundred percent seatbelt usage or you know, more and more airbags and vehicles that we have to look back to like the fundamental design of the roadway system and how these systems interact.

Jeff Wood (15m 46s):
I wanna go back to this kinetic energy thing too because I think it’s really important. It’s something that actually, like when I was reading the paper, I was like, ah, damn, this is something I didn’t really think about but I, I mean I know this intrinsically because you always see the charts that show how fast a car can go on a street and then hit somebody outside of the car and then you know what results in death, right? So that’s the basic, like you see the chart and so people are sharing that chart all the time, at least on, on Twitter, et cetera. But the underlying, you know, science principle of it is that kinetic energy. And I feel like that’s like a key fulcrum for all this discussion. And I just feel like it’s a really important point that I want to kind of hammer home. Because if you start thinking about that from that specific perspective, it does really change the way it changes everything.

Jeff Wood (16m 30s):
Look at how it all works, right? And how we can actually prevent deaths and destruction.

Dave Ederer (16m 35s):
Yeah. And and to connect this back with the Framework, so it hadn’t, in one of his original papers outlining this theory, he says, you know, control opportunities need to be based solidly on etiologic organization, you know, the cause of the field not on descriptive categorization. And so I would argue that when we use things like the ease enforcement education engineering, that’s just a descriptive categorization of the field. It isn’t getting to that cost. And when you’re an engineer sitting down and thinking about designing a roadway, you have to understand the cause of the injury, not who might be involved. And this was kind of our attempt to do that.

Jeff Wood (17m 17s):
Yeah. And you mentioned ease and that’s something that you bring up in the paper discussing the different, you know, ways that engineers look at safety. So, and they’ve added many ease over time. And the thing that came to my head even before I got to the part where you discussed adding ease was like if you add an E that’s emergency services or ambulances, it seems like you’ve already lost, right? Like that that can’t be an E if it’s at the end of the whole line of things that are happening. I imagine.

Dave Ederer (17m 41s):
Exactly. Like they are, you know, emergency services are critical. We’re not saying eliminate emergency services e M s, they do important work, but I would prefer that they don’t have to respond to crashes in the future. Right. Like rather people don’t get hurt in the first place. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (18m 1s):
It’s like the firefighters that walk around and are getting coffee in my neighborhood, I’m like, I’m glad you’re here at getting a coffee. ’cause it means you’re not out fighting a fire. Right? Absolutely.

Dave Ederer (18m 8s):
Exactly. Exactly.

Kari Watkins (18m 10s):
Well, and lemme jump in to make sure that we don’t leave the ease because I think the important points in the paper is this false equivalency of the ease. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with the safe systems Pyramid, is get rid of that false equivalency. So you know, we can throw emergency services in there as another eve, right? And, and clearly that’s the end of the line, but even, you know, education or enforcement being as important as engineering, so the actual design of the facility, like that’s not true. We can design a facility so that, you know, the kinetic energy is not as high when the crash occurs.

Kari Watkins (18m 55s):
We can do separation among different modes that are traveling at vastly different speeds. These kinds of things are gonna be much more effective than a campaign to try to get people to, you know, use their seat belts, right? So that across the ease making them equivalent to each other. And we’re just gonna throw more and more ease in there ’cause it’s more of a theme. That’s what we’re trying to get away from. Not the fundamentals of these types of things. They’re all a part of it. But the idea of the safe systems Pyramid is what do we put at the base? What’s the most important? What are we building off of? And you know, if this doesn’t work, then this part of the system is in place and if that doesn’t work, then this part of the system is in place.

Kari Watkins (19m 41s):
And if all of these things we’ve done are failing, then we have emergency services, right? Yeah.

Jeff Wood (19m 47s):
Right.

Dave Ederer (19m 48s):
Exactly.

Jeff Wood (19m 49s):
Well I do wanna talk about the pyramids ’cause I think that that was a really important part in the health pyramids and you getting to the safe systems Pyramid. And I wanna just kind of go back a little bit to an episode that y’all might not have listened to of the show, but we had Mindy full on Dr. Mindy full of on and she talked about her book Root Shock and also Main Streets. And I think that that’s a really important connection because in the discussion we had in that episode, you know, we heard about the biomedical model versus the bio-psychosocial model in, in what she was talking about and which means treating individuals bodies, but by including all other outside contexts such as the social determinants of health. And I think that’s a really important way to think of this and it also feels very similar. It probably comes from the same place as the health impact Pyramid and the hierarchy of controls, which you all use in in your paper.

Jeff Wood (20m 32s):
And so I’m, I’m wondering, you know, what that means specifically the Pyramid that you’re coming from and where you got to with the safe systems Pyramid.

Dave Ederer (20m 40s):
That’s a great point and you know, there’s only so much we can put in the paper.

Kari Watkins (20m 45s):
Well, and lemme make a plug before Dave jumps in. There is a longer version of the paper that is in his dissertation. So everyone, we worked hard to make this an open paper, right, that everyone can access. So you should be able to read the paper no matter what kinds of memberships you have to universities and things like that. But there is a little bit more in his dissertation, so you can check that out on Georgia Tech’s website as well.

Dave Ederer (21m 12s):
Yeah, we’ll see, we’ll see if we can get some of that other stuff out in the print. Yeah. But yes, and I’m not familiar with the specific models mentioned, but you know, the social ecological model, that’s something we talk a lot about in public health and just that understanding of being exposed and how exposure varies in time and space, that that’s a key public health idea. And one of the examples I really like to talk about is we know injuries and deaths happen at night on our roads far more often, right? And if someone has to take the bus at night just because they’re a shift worker and they work overnight, you know, that’s related to where they live, what kind of job they have and, and that influences their risk, right?

Dave Ederer (21m 55s):
We’ve understood that. I think the public consciousness of that is, has been raised through the Covid 19 pandemic. We understand that people’s job or whatever it might be influences their risk for covid 19. It’s the same thing in transportation. If I have to walk to the bus across a a four-lane arterial in the middle of the night, my risk is much higher because I’m being exposed to the potential of a traffic crash in a different way than someone else who might be commuting nine to five and you know, drives two miles or can telework and never has to actually commute at all. So that’s a key point there.

Jeff Wood (22m 33s):
Can you all tell me a little bit about kind of the design of the Pyramid and, and how things at the top are different than things at the bottom? And you know how the interventions specifically are all important, but they all are related to time and space and you know, individuals versus society as a whole.

Dave Ederer (22m 51s):
Exactly. And you’re starting to poke around the public health theory involved, which I really appreciate. So it’s based on, as you mentioned, the hierarchy of controls as well as the health impact Pyramid and a couple other public health models. But those were kind of the direct influences. And so I was at C D C as early in my career and Dr. Tom Frieden introduced his health impact Pyramid by basically saying there’s different things that influence our health and in public health we focus on the population and ideally, you know, we’re trying to reach as many people as possible with effective interventions and we don’t wanna require as much individual action because if I have to make a decision every time to be safe or healthy, that’s kind of a whole in the system, right?

Dave Ederer (23m 35s):
Like we want it just to be baseline, safe and healthy. So that’s why we start with the health impact Pyramid and, and put those socioeconomic factors at the bottom. And what we’re doing there is we want engineers and planners to understand that everyone’s risk profile is different and lots of different things influence not just your need to travel, but how safe you are when you do it. Even if it’s on the same infrastructure. There is that time variant factor where people are exposed to different levels of risk. So we start at the base, then we kind of go up to the built environment and again, rooted in public health ideas. The built environment, when we alter it, it changes the risk profile for everyone that’s using it and it lasts, right?

Dave Ederer (24m 17s):
We can have a really super intervention but it’s only temporary. Typically when we alter the built environment, it’s gonna last for 10, 20 years, right? And people over time are going to be safer because we do that when we keep going up. We want those passive safety measures. So like I said, we want things to be safe at baseline and we don’t want someone to have to choose to be safe, right? That act of passive safety. The thing I like here, it kind of combines the built environment and passive safety is, is streetlights are a really great example. Yes. Instead of telling people to wear reflective clothing, which requires someone to choose to wear that reflective clothing every single time, let’s just put streetlights up, that’s safer for people walking.

Dave Ederer (24m 59s):
It’s safe with people driving and it’s long lasting and exposes everyone on that infrastructure. If you’re just focusing on the individual, it’s just one person at one time. Then next up active safety measures. Those are things that super effective, but it requires people to make a decision every single time to make themselves or someone else safe. And then at the top we have education, education is super like, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to tell people to be safe, but it’s a lot harder to tell 300 million people to drive slower than it is to change the way we build and design our roadways. You

Jeff Wood (25m 38s):
Know, here in San Francisco we’re having this this outbreak of autonomous vehicles, right? It’s, it’s, I love the word outbreak and so, you know, I’ve been struggling to articulate why it bothers me, right? And I think that we just hit on something that I think is really important. Those, those vehicles are making millions of decisions that humans have to make millions of decisions at a time instead of figuring out a way to try to be safer, right? Instead of designing a system that, you know, makes their job maybe easier, right? So if we designed roads in a way that focused on the built environment and the things at the bottom of the Pyramid, it might actually make self-driving cars lives easier to a certain extent.

Jeff Wood (26m 18s):
Absolutely. And so I’m thinking about that, you know, like millions of decisions. And so if you think about AI and what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to make a thing that can try to, you know, make millions of decisions so that we don’t have to, but what if we didn’t have to have something that made all those decisions, right? So that’s kind of something that I feel like is connected to all of this and it was something that popped in my head when you said decisions and I thought, oh yeah, I mean that makes some sense where we’re making these vehicles make the the decisions instead of us because we can’t design a system that actually m makes us follow the rules inherently.

Dave Ederer (26m 50s):
Yeah. I, if we begin to think about reducing those points of conflict, you know, reducing that time exposed for any road user, making the system simpler and easier to operate safely and for human beings, it’s gonna be easier for automated vehicles to do the same thing, right? If we continue to have all these, these conflict points and why hard to cross roads, it’s still gonna be dangerous for people walking, cycling and taking Transit and it’s still gonna be a more difficult task, it’s to sign those vehicles. So if if we make it easier for human beings, we can make it easier for ai, right? So let’s start there.

Kari Watkins (27m 28s):
If I can jump in. Talking about the autonomous vehicles is always the tough point with me because I think where I get the most angry is that these vehicles demonstrate that we actually have some of these things already and we’re just choosing not to use them. So I think one of the best examples of thinking about the safe systems Pyramid is speed because there’s things related to speed at every one of the levels within the Pyramid. And so one of the things that gets me about AVS is they are often taken advantage of in the roadway system because people know that they are programmed to go a certain speed to go a safe speed, right?

Kari Watkins (28m 14s):
But we could actually put these kinds of speed governors on every vehicle in the system and suddenly excessive speeding would not be a problem. And so there’s technologies that we have that we could build into every vehicle already and we don’t have to wait for the AVS to be out there. And I think we’ve already started to do this, but some of the technologies we’re focused on building into other vehicles are not the most important ones. Like there’s lots of safety technologies that we should make sure are already being used across the board that sort of pull us down in the safe systems Pyramid from where one, many of the ways that we spend money on feed related things are not gonna be as effective as those technologies.

Jeff Wood (29m 3s):
To that point, do you think that there are any places that are using the systems that you all are talking about in the Pyramid? Because when I read the paper I felt like oh my gosh, this is such a big change to what folks are doing now. But you know, if someplace could make these changes it would be I feel like amazing at the results. And so I’m wondering if there are places that are already thinking this way and changing things. You know, not necessarily that they followed the Pyramid because it just came out, but they already are, are operating under similar ideas as the Pyramid.

Kari Watkins (29m 35s):
Yeah. So one of the other things that Dave and I share in common when he first came to join my group is a love of the Netherlands. So he helped me lead study abroad courses there. And the reason we go there is to look at their built environment and try to understand it. There are many European countries that are way ahead of us in terms of thinking about the built environment and there’s a lot of lessons that we could be taking from these places. So if you look for headlines of the places that you know have nearly reached or reached for some shorter time period, actual vision zero where they had zero fatalities for at least some, you know, measurable important time period that these are mostly northern European countries that have focused on the built environment for, you know, more than a generation at this point.

Kari Watkins (30m 30s):
These same places are doing things like automated speed enforcement, right? They’re starting to push these laws that we would not even yet consider in the us They’re starting to push these things forward in the eu. Now they’re not that much far, they’re ahead of us, right? Like a lot of this is new and and semi controversial there as well. But I think that these places offer up some examples of what we should be pushing towards. And we’re hoping that the safe systems Pyramid is, is something that might help them sort of, they’re already doing these things, but why are they doing them? They don’t necessarily have a good explanation for,

Dave Ederer (31m 8s):
I’ve got another one inside your vehicle, right? Fit inside your vehicle and look how that is designed. There aren’t sharp edges and why aren’t there sharp edges? Because sharp edges concentrate the transfer of kinetic energy, right? And your seatbelt goes across your sternum in your hips and that’s focused on the biological limits of your, of the human body, right? And that’s what we’re arguing that people who design seat belts understand energy as a pathologic agent and they’re trying to mitigate that, the transfer of force to your body and limit it, right? So when you get in a crash, that force is, is mitigated across your chest, across your hips, where it’s, your body is very strong and can handle it roll cages in crumple zones in your car.

Dave Ederer (31m 55s):
That kinetic energy is absorbed by the steel, which is a lot better at absorbing kinetic energy than the human body. So we don’t even have to go that far. Right? And it, and we can’t. And if you actually look at where Vision Zero was started, they didn’t even have it at Georgia Tech Carey, they had it at Georgia State where Lau Tal first proposed Vision Zero. It was actually at a conference on transportation and health. He’s an epidemiologist, he was reading pattern’s work and thinking about energy as a pathologic agent. So even if the professionals don’t know it now they’ve ingrained that into their professional practice, their education. So a couple places around the world and literally inside our vehicles, all of that design is related to this idea.

Jeff Wood (32m 39s):
That’s a really important point because in the paper you talk about how public health historically has informed how design goes into vehicles and those types of things. I’m also wondering though, how we’re discussing the topic now from a national level. ’cause all of those federal agencies that require, you know, seat belts and those types of things. And so, you know, transportation agencies, a lot of their goals are related to safety. But if you give them this Pyramid for example, they might say we don’t have control over over certain parts of the socioeconomic factors. We do have a bit of control over the built environment, which is second on the Pyramid, but the socioeconomic stuff we might not have control is. So I’m wondering how you can address that issue of there are levels of the Pyramid that are, that are helpful from a broad base all the way to the individual, but the folks that are part of implementing the system overall and the transportation folks might say, well maybe this doesn’t work for us because we don’t have control over this.

Kari Watkins (33m 38s):
Yeah, I would say this is why these partnerships are necessary, why the city traffic engineer needs to be meeting with the folks who are working in public health and in urban planning and and whatnot. They can’t work in a silo because they have to be talking to the people who can affect these things. What I would even say though is you’d be surprised how much we can affect these things even in transportation, right? A large part of the reason why I work in field like Bikeability and public Transit is because these are modes where we can enable people to get places at a much more equitable cost point than having to own a vehicle.

Kari Watkins (34m 22s):
And as we design our transportation system better, we can actually influence those socioeconomic factors in very, very important ways. So, so I would argue that that’s not necessarily true, but in the immediate, I think it comes from partnerships and then as you said, built environment is the next step up on the Pyramid and there’s tons we can do there where we don’t have to look externally at all.

Jeff Wood (34m 49s):
Absolutely. I feel like the Pyramid is a good introduction to this public health idea, but I think it also can be used in many other ways aside from and from a safety perspective, but you can actually extrapolate it to a number of different other issues that maybe transportation agencies are having. The thing that popped in my head when I was reading the paper was we’re thinking a lot about safety on Transit systems, right? And so they’re having to deal with things related to social issues. A lot of folks say, you know, the Transit system is kind of the last line of defense or the last place of refuge for a lot of folks. And so they’re actually the place where the socioeconomic issues come to a head. And so I feel like focusing on something like the Pyramid where you can design something that allows you to address all those issues.

Jeff Wood (35m 34s):
It can be focused not just on traffic safety issues, but just, but just safety generally from a whole transportation systems thinking perspective.

Dave Ederer (35m 41s):
Exactly. I mean we define safety fairly narrowly ’cause we think about crashing. But if, if you think about violence, feeling safe is key to being able to walk, move cycles, move in your community. If you don’t feel safe, you won’t do that. And you know, one thing we talked about when, when forming this is, you know, those different levels are interactive, they influence each other. And Carrie started to talk about that the built environment influences the, the socioeconomic environment and it goes back and forth. It’s really not one way. And thinking about those different things that influence whether we move or not where we move is really important and it, it is bigger than just speeding cars, right?

Dave Ederer (36m 23s):
There’s all sorts of different issues that are at play there. But you nailed it. I feel like I didn’t even need to answer ’cause you covered it.

Jeff Wood (36m 31s):
Well Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. So Dave, I’m really curious about Safe Systems as an idea. I’m wondering if the SS was purposeful.

Dave Ederer (36m 41s):
It was, so you, you’ve probably seen some people use the phrase safe system. We were very intentional about calling this the Safe systems Pyramid. ’cause you think about in engineering, we like to define our system in what we’re working on. And if we’re only thinking about the transportation system, our goals and objectives are very different than if we’re thinking about multiple systems at once. So what I wanted to emphasize is that we’re working on multiple systems that are interactive with one another. So our decisions in the transportation system influence human systems, natural systems. And we have to think about that. And that changes how we make decisions when we realize that the inputs and outputs of our systems influence other ones in different ways.

Jeff Wood (37m 27s):
Well, so what do you all hope that folks take away from the paper on a kind of 30,000 foot level before they dive into implementing the Pyramid themselves?

Dave Ederer (37m 37s):
Honestly, where you started understanding this idea that the transfer of energy is the pathologic agent. And when you understand that, I think it really changes how you think about how we design transportation. Like people will talk about painted bike lanes versus a raised bike lane, right? A curb actually deflects a vehicle in space. A painted line doesn’t do that. It’s all about energy and managing it within space. So if we can start there, I think we’re, we’re doing a really good job.

Kari Watkins (38m 8s):
And I would pair this with kind of where we ended with the basics of the Pyramid itself. That we have to think about fixing the socioeconomic factors like as a key critical piece of all of this. We have to think about next the built environment and these are the things that we have to be focused on. And then after that we have to think about things that are, people are not actively having to do, right? Systems where we’re using technology, where we’re doing these things where it’s not me who has to make the choice that, you know, the vehicle is making the choice or the infrastructure is making the choice so obvious that there’s not a choice to be made.

Kari Watkins (38m 50s):
And only after that do we start to think about these other components, right? So I would say, you know, sort of internalizing and staring at that Pyramid the way that obviously you have from your last question. That’s I think the other part that we’re really hoping people will take away.

Jeff Wood (39m 7s):
Awesome. Well the paper is a Safe Systems Pyramid, A, New Framework for Traffic Safety. I’ll put a link to the paper in the show notes and I really do hope people read it because I think it is really important just going through and reading it to put together the questions for this show specifically. Obviously I came up with lots of things and ideas that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and so I really appreciate that. What’s next with the, with the project and the program and the ideas?

Kari Watkins (39m 31s):
Yeah, so if anybody is listening who might have funding,

Jeff Wood (39m 38s):
We do have funders listening.

Kari Watkins (39m 40s):
You’ve got not just us, but some other universities interested. So at Davis we’re interested. I’ve got another PhD student, Rachel Panic, and I don’t know where she is gonna end up, but this is her line of work as well. And we’ve been talking to lots of folks. We’re hoping to put together curriculum materials so that all of this would be easy for folks to embed if they’re teaching an introduction to transportation course or anything else that touches on safety at least a little bit. We’re hoping to do some further work on applications. So how is it that we can actually help people think through examples of how they would apply the Pyramid?

Kari Watkins (40m 20s):
Just in initial talks with some of the communities that do these things, they’re really overwhelmed. They love the idea of Vision Zero, but nobody knows quite how to actually bring that into practice. And so there’s great examples of that. So starting to accumulate examples and talk about how, you know, the Pyramid could actually be applied. That’s one of the other things that we’re focused on.

Jeff Wood (40m 44s):
Awesome. Where can folks find you all if you wish to be found?

Kari Watkins (40m 48s):
I can be found at the University of California Davis. I’m in the civil and environmental engineering program there and I do research through the Institute of Transportation studies, I t s Davis.

Dave Ederer (41m 1s):
And so this work was completed while I was a doctoral student at Georgia Tech. I’ve since moved on to C D C, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and I work in the physical activity and health branch.

Jeff Wood (41m 13s):
Awesome. Well Kari and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time,

Kari Watkins (41m 18s):
Thank you for having us.

Dave Ederer (41m 20s):
Yeah, it’s been fun.