Special volume: call for submissions

The Safe System approach recognizes that people will make mistakes, but that these mistakes should not result in death or serious injury. Speed management is central to achieving this goal, linking human tolerance to crash forces with the design and operation of the road transport system. Appropriate speeds can reduce both accident risk and injury severity, while effective speed management requires contributions from road design, vehicles, policy, enforcement, and road users.

Traffic Safety Research is launching a special volume focusing on this subject. We invite research that improves our understanding of what constitutes a safe speed and how safe speeds can be achieved across different road and traffic environments.

Submission topics include, but are not limited to:

• speed–injury risk relationships, including human biomechanical tolerance and injury-risk curves
• principles and methods for setting safe speeds for different environments, road functions, and road-user categories
• speed management for pedestrians, cyclists, powered two-wheelers, and other vulnerable road users
• speed management policies, governance, implementation, and evaluation
• speed limits and speed-limit policies
• infrastructure design, traffic calming, and self-enforcing roads
• automated and traditional speed enforcement and their effectiveness
• Intelligent Speed Assistance and other vehicle-based speed-management technologies
• road-user behaviour, speed choice, compliance, and acceptance
• economic, equity, mobility, environmental, and public-health effects of safe-speed policies
• conflicts and synergies between the implementation of safe speeds and other sustainability goals and policies
• speed management in diverse traffic environments, including those in low- and middle-income countries
• innovative data, methods, models, and indicators for understanding and evaluating safe speeds.

Interdisciplinary contributions are encouraged.

Submission instructions

At the start of the submission process, select the section Special volume ‘Safe speeds and speed management’. This will ensure that your manuscript follows the correct editorial track.

The general guidelines for authors can be found here. We strongly recommend that authors familiarize themselves with the suggested submission template, particularly the compulsory declarations and statements to be included at the end of the manuscript.

All submissions will be subject to the journal’s standard peer-review process and handled by the regular editorial team.

Submission period

Submissions to the special volume are open until 31 January 2028.

Accepted papers will be published on a rolling basis.

Publication fees

Traffic Safety Research applies a production fee to accepted manuscripts. The fee is intentionally kept low and is based directly on the upfront cost of preparing an ‘average’ TSR article for publication (no profit is intended).

Discounts and full fee waivers are available to authors from low- and middle-income countries (read more here). Eligibility is determined by the country of the first author's main affiliation.

Authors affiliated with a TSR sponsor organization are normally covered by a special agreement that exempts them from paying the production fee. Eligibility is based on the first author's main affiliation.