Benchmarking road safety performances of countries

Road safety risk evaluation and target setting using data envelopment analysis and its extensions

Strengthening incentives for efficient road safety policy priorities: The roles of cost–benefit analysis and road pricing

Machine learning currently holds a vital position in predicting collision severity. Identifying factors associated with heightened risks of injury and fatalities aids in enhancing road safety measures and management. Presently, Thailand faces considerable challenges with respect to road traffic accidents. These challenges are particularly acute in industrial zones, where they contribute to a rise in injuries and fatalities. The mixture of heavy traffic, comprising both trucks and non-trucks, significantly amplifies the risk of accidents. This situation, hence, generates profound concerns for road safety in Thailand. Consequently, discerning the factors that influence the severity of injuries and fatalities becomes pivotal for formulating effective road safety policies and measures. This study is specifically aimed at predicting the factors contributing to the severity of accidents involving truck and non-truck collisions in industrial zones. It considers a variety of aspects, including roadway characteristics, underlying assumptions of cause, crash characteristics, and weather conditions. Due to the fact that accident data is big data with specific characteristics and complexity, with the employment of machine learning in tandem with the Multi-variate Adaptive Regression Splines technique, we can make precise predictions to identify the factors influencing the severity of collision outcomes. The analysis demonstrates that various factors augment the severity of accidents involving trucks. These include darting in front of a vehicle, head-on collisions, and pedestrian collisions. Conversely, for non-truck related collisions, the significant factors that heighten severity are tailgating, running signs/signals, angle collisions, head-on collisions, overtaking collisions, pedestrian collisions, obstruction collisions, and collisions during overcast conditions. These findings illuminate the significant factors influencing the severity of accidents involving trucks and non-trucks. Such insights provide invaluable information for developing targeted road safety measures and policies, thereby contributing to the mitigation of injuries and fatalities.

BackgroundAccording to WHO’s Global Status Report on Road Safety 2023, global road traffic crash (RTC) deaths decreased. However, they increased in most of the low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). Research suggests systemic...

Designing a composite indicator for road safety

Evaluation of a stimulation plan for municipalities in the Netherlands

BackgroundThe Safe System/Vision Zero approach (SSA) has a well-developed set of concepts, practices and methods like human tolerance, humans make mistakes, unacceptability of road traffic deaths and serious injuries, shared...

Road safety policy measures are meant to improve road safety, i.e., to reduce the number of people injured or killed in road traffic crashes. Despite the obvious benefits of such policy measures, often public support is low, because often such measures require road users to give up some of their freedom of movement. In this chapter, it is shown how differences in national culture are associated with differences in the level of public support for a range of policy measures. National culture can be operationalized into several dimensions. Using data from a recent update of two of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (labeled as “Independent” and “Confucianist”), it is first shown that these dimensions are strongly associated with economic indicators and road safety performance. Subsequently, it is illustrated that these dimensions can also be good predictors for public support for several road safety measures, in particular when these are perceived to restrict freedom of movement.

BackgroundIn recent years, there has been an increasing interest in implementing road safety policy by different low income countries. However; the evidence is scarce on its success in the reduction of crashes, injuries and deaths. This study was conducted to assess whether road crashes, injuries and fatalities was reduced following the road safety regulation introduced as of September 2007 by Oromia Regional State Transport Bureau.MethodsRoutine road traffic accident data for the year 2002-2011were collected from sixteen traffic police offices. Data on average daily vehicle flow was obtained from the Ethiopian Road Authority. Interrupted time series design using segmented linear regression model was applied to estimate the effect of an improved road safety policy.ResultsA total of 4,053 crashes occurred on Addis Ababa - Adama/Hawassa main road. Of these crashes, almost half 46.4% (1,880) were property damage, 29.4% (1,193) were fatal and 24.2% (980) injury crashes, resulting 1,392 fatalities and 1,749 injuries. There were statistically significant reductions in non-injury crashes and deaths. Non-injury crash was reduced by 19% and fatality by 12.4% in the first year of implementing the revised transport safety regulation.ConclusionAlthough revised road safety policy helped in reducing motor vehicle crashes and associated fatalities, the overall incidence rate is still very high. Further action is required to avoid unnecessary loss of lives.

1D.004 Strengthening road safety policies: examples from philippines, China, India and Tanzania

In 1997, the Riksdag, the Swedish Parliament, adopted Vision Zero as a new goal and strategy for road safety in Sweden (Swedish Government 1997). In the more than 20 years since the Vision Zero policy was adopted, it has spread internationally as a model of a public road safety policy (OECD/ITF 2008, 2016; World Health Organization 2017). It is not only in the transport sector that Vision Zero has attracted interest; it has also spread and continues to spread to other sectors of Swedish society such as fire safety, patient safety, occupational accidents, and suicide (Kristianssen et al. 2018). Although, road safety policies and strategies can be developed and adopted by a variety of actors at different levels in the society in a democracy, parliaments have a special position, and it establishes an exclusive legitimacy in the society. According to the Swedish Constitution (Swedish Parliament 2016), all public power proceeds from the people, and the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) is the foremost representative of the people. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the Swedish Parliament and the Swedish Government and how road safety, as a public policy, finds its way into public agenda in a competing political environment. The decision to adopt Vision Zero in Sweden was a rather radical change (Belin et al. 2011) of that time safety policy. This chapter examines the political decision-making process that preceded the decision by the Swedish Parliament to adopt the Vision Zero policy in 1997 (Swedish Parliament 1997) and the decision to re-evaluate Vision Zero in 2004 (Swedish Parliament 2004).

The problem of road safety is not a new topic in Hong Kong. Every year there are more than ten thousands road traffic accidents of different severities involving more than ten thousands injuries. The trend of accident remains constant over the recent years. Yet serious injuries and deaths due to traffic accidents are still unavoidable. Therefore, more efforts have to be spent to reduce the impact from the road safety problem.
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\nThe road safety problem can be measured quantitatively by the numbers of accidents, injuries, and deaths, etc. The greater the values in these numbers, e.g. more deaths or injuries, the more serious the road safety problem is. The “ultimate” goal in solving the road safety problem is to “totally” eliminate the number of accidents and casualties, i.e. setting the target to “zero”. Though it is impossible to eliminate all traffic accidents, measures and policies implemented in improving the road safety conditions are still very important in achieving the “zero” accident target.
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\nThis study aims to find alternative means to express the road safety problems in addition to the conventional numbers as mentioned above. This alternative means is called the Road Safety Index. Although the Road Safety Index is not a new concept, it has never been generally applied in Hong Kong. Through reviewing the road safety related indices adopted outside Hong Kong, and studying the kinds of traffic accident data available in Hong Kong, the feasibility of developing a Road Safety Index in Hong Kong has been found.

Materials and methods The government budget documents from 5 ministries including Ministry of Transport, Education, Interior, Public Health and Royal Thai Police were reviewed. Two researchers identified budget used in road safety projects with 5-E strategies independently; the kappa analysis was used to test inter-rater reliability. Information from Thai Health Promotion Foundation and Road Safety Fund was also gathered using a developed excel-based template. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among road safety experts. Some mathematical and statistical analyses were applied to evaluate the efficiency of road safety policy.

Car drivers' road safety performance: A benchmark across 32 countries

Exploring the temporal stability of global road safety statistics