Improving the Accident Rate on The Road of NSW In Australia - Essay Example

In the context of accident prevention and reducing the likely hood of recurrence of accidents in the future human element is the most adaptable but also vulnerable to influence which can affect human performance in a given operational condition. In the context of road accidents in New South Wales, the risk-taking behavior of drivers may be due to psychological and social factors. For example, peer group pressure, drink driving and perception, hazard perception, other social factors like a family environment, traffic congestion, weather condition, road condition, perception of seat belts and its importance, fatigue perception and driving, inappropriate use of technology, driver distractions, licensing systems, law enforcement, and penalty system, inappropriate education, and training, may affect different driver groups and may affect their risk-taking behavior on roads and may be contributing to the incident of an accident or may contribute to an accident on New South Wales road.

To get a deeper insight into accident prevention and recurrence the SHEL model even though it is developed for Aviation Industry safety prevention and accident reduction can shed light on why the human error occurs and what factors interact to contribute to an accident on roads in New South Wales.

The SHEL model places emphasis on human beings and its interfaces with other parts of a system such as hardware which is the Road and traffic physical system in NSW, procedures, education training and support systems the software and the environment, or operational conditions such as weather condition, condition of roads, sign system, traffic congestion, social factors and demographic factors in the context of road accident in New South Wales. That is Shel model is a systematic approach that encourages to development of comprehensive road safety countermeasures addressing all the parts of the system and not focusing on one or two factors that contribute to human error and produce inappropriate behavior. This enables to development of effective road safety strategies which are comprehensive and researched based and tailor programs to targeted groups of drivers and high-risk areas and therefore allocate resources in a cost-effective manner which produces a maximum reduction in the accident rate in New south wales.

In this paper, I discuss in detail how the SHEL model can be applied to develop road safety strategy development based on what factors interact to produce accidents based on current research on factors affecting accidents on particular driver groups so that to develop targeted strategies based on the findings of these research and consider all elements of the road system as depicted by the SHEL model.