A major weakness of early road safety policies in high-income countries in the 1950s and 1960s was the assumption that the primary goal was to correct human errors in road crashes rather than an acknowledgment that the causes of crashes are related to the inherent risks of using road infrastructure. These early road safety efforts often relied excessively on driver education measures. The pioneering injury-prevention matrix developed by Haddon in 1970 encouraged evaluation of all the factors that contribute to road injury and provided a methodology to assess the effectiveness of a full range of potential counter measures. He elaborated a ten-point strategy to reduce the harmful interactions of this energy transfer which has played a major role in road safety policy making ever since.