Objectives:
This article treats road traffic safety as a strand of state security policy, one that reaches beyond its familiar legal and administrative framing. It traces the direction of legislative change in Poland between 2015 and 2026, asking how far this field has shaped Polish security policy over the period.

Methods:
The analysis covers amendments to the Penal Code, the Road Traffic Law, the Act on Drivers, and the Road Transport Act, read against strategic documents, chiefly the National Road Safety Programme 2021–2030. The study rests on doctrinal legal analysis, supplemented by accident, fatality, injury, and drink-driving data for 2015–2025, plus a comparison with Germany, France, and Sweden.

Results:
Polish policy has drifted, slowly and unevenly, from a purely punitive model toward the Safe System's assumptions, though the shift is still mostly on paper: legislative practice keeps leaning on repressive instruments. Available data will not support crediting legal change alone for better safety outcomes once infrastructure, technology, and social factors are set aside. Poland's accident-rate gap against the reference states owes more to infrastructure quality and safety culture than to criminal provisions.

Conclusions:
Road traffic safety remains only partly integrated into Poland's state security policy, despite the formal adoption of the Safe System model. The article calls for clearer recognition of this field in future editions of the National Security Strategy, a stronger institutional standing for the National Road Safety Council, and legislative priorities tied more closely to systemic prevention than to the reactive, piecemeal law-making that has dominated so far.