Seeing the system behind the behaviour
I'm Dr Amy Williamson. An independent advisor in behavioural science and road safety
Road trauma rarely comes down to one bad decision. Violations, errors, lapses of attention. These are predictable features of human behaviour, not exceptions to it. What determines whether they lead to harm is the system those people are operating in.
I work to understand road user behaviour, human factors, and the interventions designed to influence them. But I apply a systems lens to that work. Rather than asking "who is behaving unsafely?", I ask what conditions within the system are producing, amplifying, or mitigating risk, and where responsibility and capacity to act actually sit.
That means looking beyond the individual to the regulatory environment, enforcement systems, licensing frameworks, organisational conditions, and social context that shape what people do - and what needs to change to reduce how exposed they are when things go wrong.
Understanding behaviour is one thing. Understanding the system that shapes it is another.
Frameworks like the Safe System approach have fundamentally changed how we think about road trauma. Moving responsibility away from individual road users and towards the conditions that determine whether mistakes cause harm. My work builds on that foundation and helps us in asking the harder questions about where risk is produced, who is exposed, and where the conditions that shape safe behaviour actually need to change.
I bring more than 20 years of specialist expertise at the national strategy and public policy level across New Zealand and Australia - spanning road safety strategy, regulation, licensing, enforcement, and speed management.
That combination of technical expertise and systems perspective means I can help you design responses that are grounded in evidence, targeted at the right leverage points, attentive to equity, and honest about what any single intervention can and can't achieve on its own.
I’ve built this expertise advising Ministers and senior executives, chairing the Austroads Safe People Technical Reference Group, providing technical leadership on national road safety and regulatory strategy, and leading submissions on legislative reform. I know what it takes to translate good evidence into policy, and what happens when that translation goes wrong.