Kenngineering Notes: Our New Road Safety Engineering 101 Course
Feb 2, 2026
Spent part of the summer preparing content for a tailored Road Safety Engineering 101 course that we’ve been commissioned to deliver in 2026.
One of the many things I revisited was the ratio of Fatal and Serious Injury to other injury outcomes in Victorian road trauma. After some analysis, it appears to have remained generally stable over time. Roughly 21 Fatal and Serious Injuries to 48 other injuries, or about 1 to 2.3.
That took me back to a book I read years ago, Practical Loss Control Leadership (Bird and Germain), which introduced the classic ‘accident triangle’ [we would probably call it a incident triangle these days] from industrial and occupational safety.
Their ratio was:
1 serious or major injury
10 minor injuries
30 property damage incidents
600 near misses
So you might say road/street safety behaves very differently to industrial safety. When things go wrong on roads, the outcomes are far more likely to be severe. Alternatively, part of this difference may be driven by reporting practices and by differences in injury definitions and categorisation across industries and jurisdictions. Minor injuries on roads are far less likely to be reported than minor injuries in workplace settings, and what constitutes a reportable injury can vary substantially between systems.
Interestingly, Victoria no longer collects property damage only crash data, so it is not possible to test whether that part of the ratio holds. Near misses are even more challenging. We have never had robust near miss data in road trauma, but with probe data and trajectory based analytics emerging rapidly, that may be about to change.
This level of detail and context is exactly what we are building into the course. Not just the what, but the why, the limitations, and how to interpret safety data properly.
Road safety engineering is never just about numbers. It is about understanding the system behind them, understanding road design, understanding the Safe System, and developing solutions that address risk. 𝙉𝙤𝙩 𝙟𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙠, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙨𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙘 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙠.
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Spent part of the summer preparing content for a tailored Road Safety Engineering 101 course that we’ve been commissioned to deliver in 2026.
One of the many things I revisited was the ratio of Fatal and Serious Injury to other injury outcomes in Victorian road trauma. After some analysis, it appears to have remained generally stable over time. Roughly 21 Fatal and Serious Injuries to 48 other injuries, or about 1 to 2.3.
That took me back to a book I read years ago, Practical Loss Control Leadership (Bird and Germain), which introduced the classic ‘accident triangle’ [we would probably call it a incident triangle these days] from industrial and occupational safety.
Their ratio was:
So you might say road/street safety behaves very differently to industrial safety. When things go wrong on roads, the outcomes are far more likely to be severe. Alternatively, part of this difference may be driven by reporting practices and by differences in injury definitions and categorisation across industries and jurisdictions. Minor injuries on roads are far less likely to be reported than minor injuries in workplace settings, and what constitutes a reportable injury can vary substantially between systems.
Interestingly, Victoria no longer collects property damage only crash data, so it is not possible to test whether that part of the ratio holds. Near misses are even more challenging. We have never had robust near miss data in road trauma, but with probe data and trajectory based analytics emerging rapidly, that may be about to change.
This level of detail and context is exactly what we are building into the course. Not just the what, but the why, the limitations, and how to interpret safety data properly.
Road safety engineering is never just about numbers. It is about understanding the system behind them, understanding road design, understanding the Safe System, and developing solutions that address risk. 𝙉𝙤𝙩 𝙟𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙠, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙨𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙘 𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙠.