Protecting Legal and Illegal Voluntary On-Road Collectors

The health community uses a harm reduction model that deals with harm reduction at four levels: conceptual, practical, policy, and programmatic. The road safety community has adopted the Safe System as their harm reduction model. The Safe System is underpinned by the key principles: people make mistakes, the human body has limited biomechanical tolerance, there is a shared responsibility for creating a safer system and we aspire for zero death and serious injury in transport. The interacting elements/levers to achieve these principles are road and roadsides (infrastructure), safe people, safe vehicles, and safe speeds. Using on-road collectors as a specific example, the relationship between the health-based harm reduction model and the Safe System reveals that the Safe System assumes the conceptual, practical and policy levels to be pre-determined, and thus restricts itself to the programmatic level of the health-based harm reduction model.