Road safety policy Research Papers (original) (raw)

Decisions that highway and traffic engineers make significantly affect the safety of road users. The documents that guide highway and traffic engineering practice suggest that many of these decisions be made by 'engineering judgment'. One would like this judgment to be informed by evidence-based anticipation of their likely safety consequences and by a professional ability to balance safety against mobility and other dimensions of 'utility'. I show that these desiderata are largely unfulfilled. The many implications of this finding are discussed.

Il fenomeno degli incidenti stradali è stato avvertito come problema pubblico solo negli ultimi anni. In questo volume viene fornito un quadro completo della situazione, dal traffico insostenibile alla sicurezza dei veicoli, ai comportamenti di guida, ai costi umani e sociali dell'insicurezza sulle strade. Vengono poi analizzate le politiche della sicurezza stradale adottate in vari Paesi europei e in Italia, mettendone a confronto gli esiti e mostrando che ridurre gli incidenti e le loro conseguenze è un obiettivo realistico oltre che conveniente sotto il profilo economico.

- by Chiara Tintori
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- Road safety policy, Road Safety Campaigns, Public Policy

Working with government, industry associations and industry partners, the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia's (IPWEA) two year-initiative, the Street Lighting and Smart Controls (SLSC) Programme is designed to help accelerate the deployment of LED street lights and
smart controls in Australia and New Zealand. This initiative builds on IPWEA’s close monitoring of street lighting developments since 2012. In 2014, it published its well-received Practice Note 11: Towards More Sustainable Street Lighting. IPWEA’s vision with the SLSC Programme is to see near full deployment of LED street lighting and smart controls by 2027. Achieving this goal will deliver a range of financial, energy productivity, environmental, road safety, public safety and community liveability objectives as outlined in this Australian Roadmap for the SLSC Programme.

- by Godfrey Bridger and +1
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- Road safety, Australia, Smart Cities, New Zealand

This review scrutinized the accident situations in Nigeria, which precipitated the Federal Government’s ban on sales of alcoholic drinks in all motor parks and factors that negatively affected the workability of the ban in preventing road accidents among commercial drivers. These were with a view to providing guidelines for effective future safety policy implementation in Nigeria. The ban was ineffective as a result of poor enlightenment about the programme, lack of enforcement, lack of evaluation, assessment reports and follow-up. The research concluded that safety policies and programmes such as the ban could be an impetus for accident prevention, if these issues are addressed. Also, empirical researches to evaluate such programmes are suggested.

Evidence shows when a motorcycle is involved in an accident with another vehicle, the driver not the rider is usually to blame. Yet motorcycle riders are portrayed as dangerous road users, the reality is motorcycle riders are no more... more

- by Steve Bardsley
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- Motorcycles, Motorcycle Safety, Road safety policy, Road Safety Campaigns

Intersections are critical places which experience high levels of accidents due to the availability of vehicle movements from different directions. Therefore, there is a need to understand the factors that significantly contribute to injuries at such places. These factors can fall under different dimensions in traffic safety such as environmental conditions, road user behavior, traffic police enforcement, road design and crash characteristics. The paper will analyze the factors related to crash characteristics and traffic signal operation that affect the likelihood of accident severity located at intersections. The data for intersection accidents in Abu Dhabi from 2013 to 2016 were used in this analysis. Ordinal logistic model was considered for the analysis to account for the ordinal nature of severity levels. Several diagnostics tests of the model were preformed such as parameters evaluation, overall model evaluation and prediction accuracy. For parameter evaluation, out of 11 independent variables, 6 were non-significant and dropped from the model. Most of the non-significant variables were related to the driver-at-fault details. The results of the final model showed an overall good fit based on a p-value of less than 0.05, as well as a good accuracy of prediction 84.8%. Finally, odds ratios were estimated to interpret the final results of the model.

- by Abdulla Galadari
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- Engineering, Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering, Safety Engineering

Amidst rapid urban development, sustainable transportation solutions are required to meet the increasing demands for mobility whilst mitigating the potentially negative social, economic, and environmental impacts. This study analyses autonomous vehicles (AVs) as a potential transportation solution for smart and sustainable development. We identified privacy and cybersecurity risks of AVs as crucial to the development of smart and sustainable cities and examined the steps taken by governments around the world to address these risks. We highlight the literature that supports why AVs are essential for smart and sustainable development. We then identify the aspects of privacy and cybersecurity in AVs that are important for smart and sustainable development. Lastly, we review the efforts taken by the federal government in the US, the UK, China, Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, France, and the EU, and by US state governments to address AV-related privacy and cybersecurity risks in-depth. Overall, the actions taken by governments to address privacy risks are mainly in the form of regulations or voluntary guidelines. To address cybersecurity risks, governments have mostly resorted to regulations that are not specific to AVs and are conducting research and fostering research collaborations with the private sector.

- by Hazel Lim and +1
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- Information Systems, Risk Management and Insurance, Transportation Engineering, Information Science

An efficient management system and leadership body is one of the key requirements for a road safety improvement program. In low-and middle-income countries, the organizational structure of the management system may suffer from deficiencies weakening the institutional functions across key road safety players. Hence, it is necessary to form an inner-and inter-organization evaluation framework encompassing all the processes, events, dependencies, and causation among road safety players. In this paper, a (three-stage) system thinking approach is developed to evaluate the behavior of inter-organizational complex system and to determine major deficiencies in the role of the road safety lead agency. The first stages of the system thinking approach starts with drawing diagrams (i.e. multiple-effect and multiple-criteria trees) that allows identifying the chains of reasoning behind events or consequences. The next stage of the system thinking approach embodies the analytic network process (ANP), an advanced multi-criteria decision-making technique, which handles the lead agency capacity evaluation and helps to determine how and by what magnitude any of the players can affect the national road safety. The proposed method applies to the case of Iran, a middle-income developing country in the Middle East. Since in Iran, the Road Safety Commission (RSC) has been established as the lead agency, it was expected that RSC owns the greatest influence on the status of road safety. However, our results show that the overall influence of RSC on road safety is far less than what was expected. Subsequently, a supplementary procedure is proposed to specify institutional reforms in order to avoid such organizational inefficiencies.

- by José Ignacio Nazif Munoz
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- Road safety, United Nations, Chile, Road safety policy

Vehicle traffic in Phnom Penh City, Cambodia, has worsened recently because of more cars, especially motorbikes, owing to the rapidly increasing population and economic growth within Cambodia. This raises concerns involving future CO 2 emissions. One means of improving the city's traffic problems and reducing CO 2 emissions is to reduce the number of private vehicles on road by developing a public transit system. This study evaluates public transportation choices on the basis of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) survey conducted to investigate the feasibility, assign priority criteria, and evaluate alternatives on the basis of potential demand in different areas and for various demographics of the city population. AHP is a multicriteria decision-making method applied to solving social, governmental, and corporate decision problems. We aim to use a new method by simplifying the AHP structure on the demand side when applied to residential transportation preferences.

Traditional mainline toll plaza (TMTP) is considered the most high risk locations on the toll roads. Conversion from TMTP or Hybrid Mainline Toll Plaza (HMTP) to an All-Electronic Toll Collection (AETC) system has demonstrated measured improvements in traffic operations and environmental issues. However, there is a lack of research that quantifies the safety impacts of these new tolling systems. This study evaluated the safety effectiveness of conversion from TMTP or HMTP to AETC system. An extensive data collection was conducted that included a hundred mainline toll plazas located on more than 750 miles of the toll roads in Florida. Various observational before-after studies including the Empirical Bayes method were applied.
The results indicated that the conversion from the TMTP to an AETC system resulted in an average crash reduction of 77, 76, and 67 percent for total, fatal-and-injury and Property Damage Only (PDO) crashes, respectively; for rear end and Lane Change Related (LCR) crashes the average reductions were 81 and 75 percent. The conversion from HMTP to AETC system enhanced traffic safety by reducing crashes by 23, 29 and 19 percent for total, fatal-and-injury, and PDO crashes; also, for rear end and LCR crashes, the average reductions were 15 and 21 percent, respectively.
Overall, this paper provided an up-to-date safety impact of using different toll collection systems. The results proved that the AETC system significantly improved traffic safety for all crash categories; and changed toll plazas from the highest risk on Expressways to be similar to regular segments.

This article outlines a capacity review of Romania’s national road infrastructure and road safety in general. Romania’s road fatality rate per 100,000 population has improved overall from a 2008 high of around 15 to the current 2019 value of 9.6. However, the rate has flat-lined with no real improvement for the last decade, stalling at around 9.7 over the period 2011- 2019 and around double the EU rate. Moreover, Romania’s total annual number of road deaths has remained at an average of around 1900 fatalities per annum over this period. Romania has been the worst performing country in the European Union (EU) in recent years, and one of the worst performing countries compared to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations in terms of road safety. The review performed in 2016 found inadequate political leadership and commitment to effective actions to reduce road fatalities, fragmented government road safety activities across a number
of regulatory entities, speed limits set at levels that exceed internationally accepted survivable limits, weak traffic law enforcement including a lack of speed enforcement cameras resulting in a failure of drivers to comply with speed limits, and a lack of structured programs to implement human error tolerant road infrastructure constructed according to Safe System principles. A series of recommendations from the capacity review were adopted (as described here) since 2016, although much remains to improve road safety in Romania.

Although Romania joined the European Union in 2007 and adhered to its regulations regarding road safety, until 2016 there was a lack and disparity in the legislation on this field. Romania was one of the fewest countries in EU without an assumed National Road Safety Strategy, and even though a National Law on Road Safety Audit was adopted in 2008, it was hardly applied. Thus, the results of the policy gap can be clearly noticed in road safety statistics. Romania is one of the worst performing countries in EU on road safety, but hopefully, after previous years actions, this will change. The end of 2015 brought Romania a new government, with an intermediary and non-politic status, a technocrat government with specialists from all fields of interests. One of the priorities of this executive was road safety, especially with the two main topics: National Road Safety Strategy, and its Action Plan (which were in a draft status since 2010 and were never adopted by the Romanian Government); Law no. 265/2008 on road infrastructure safety management, which regulates Road Safety Audits and Inspections (a law with many flaws, which needed to be corrected in order to be properly applied).

Objective: The objective of this study is to determine the short- and long-term impacts of Serbia’s 2009 update of child restraint and seat belt legislation on the incidence of pediatric motor vehicle–related injury.
With this new law, the use of child restraints in children age 0–3 became mandatory, and children 4–12 had to wear seat belts in the rear seats.
Methods: A unique data set with assembled information from public institutions of the Republic of Serbia from January 2004 to December 2014 and analyses based on interrupted time series were carried out.
Eight outcome variables were assessed: monthly rate of injured children for 2 age groups 0–3 and 4–12 per child population, number of registered motor vehicles, number of passengers transported, and number of passengers’ kilometers traveled. Independent variables were short- and long-term impacts of Serbia’s legislation update (June 2009). Data on injuries were obtained from Serbia’s Road Traffic Safety Agency. Child population and other transport-related data were obtained from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. We excluded fatalities from the analysis.
Results: In the first year of the updated legislation there was a reduction of 2.0% (confidence interval [CI], 0.1; 3.9) of injured children aged 0–3 and a reduction of 2.5% (CI, 0.6; 4.3) of injured children aged 4–12. Six
years after enactment of the legislation, a significant reduction of 8.2% (CI, 3.5; 13.0) of injured children aged 4–12 was observed, but a nonsignificant reduction of 1.1% (CI, −5.8; 3.5) was found for injured children aged 0–3. By December 2014, 369 (CI, 186; 555) injuries among children aged 4–12 were avoided.
Conclusions: The case of Serbia suggests that the new law was effective in reducing injuries among children aged 0–3 in the short term and injuries among children aged 4–12 in both the short term and long term. To understand these results, we suggest 2 hypotheses. First, low proper usage of child restraint and weak police enforcement were likely to explain the short-term effect among children aged 0–3. Second, access to seat belts in rear seats was probably a condition that
facilitated the use of these devices among children aged 4–12, protecting them during the period of the study.

- by José Ignacio Nazif Munoz
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- Time series analysis, Serbia, ARIMA, Road safety policy

Objective: This article assesses pedestrian behavior and safety at zebra crossings in the Cape
Coast Metropolis.
Method: A mix of a naturalistic exploratory and descriptive study was conducted using both primary
and secondary data. The primary data included an observational study of over 6,000 pedestrians
using zebra crossings in the metropolis. The secondary data were obtained from the
national road traffic crashes (RTCs) database at the Building and Road Research Institute covering
information on pedestrian crashes between 2007 and 2016 in the metropolis. Analyses were conducted
using frequencies and percentages with Pearson’s chi-square correlation used to establish
the relationship between independent and dependent variables.
Results: The findings showed that the majority of the 328 pedestrian crashes between 2007 and
2016 resulted in either fatalities or serious injuries and occurred at locations away from a junction.
Most of the pedestrians observed used the zebra crossing were alone and engaged in talking or
using mobile phone. Age group, pedestrian status, and the location of the zebra crossings influenced
pedestrians’ risky behaviors.
Conclusion: The majority of the pedestrian crashes in the metropolis resulted in injuries resulting
in hospitalization or fatalities and occurred at a midblock. Pedestrians largely exhibited risky
behaviors predisposing the occurrence of RTCs at zebra crossings despite the fact that they are a
pedestrian right-of-way. There is therefore the need for the National Road Safety Commission to
carry out campaigns to educate pedestrians on the safer use of zebra crossings.

- by THOMAS OJO
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- Pedestrian Movement, Road safety policy

Acest Manual de Siguranta Rutiera se doreste a fi documentul tehnic care sa stea la baza acceptarii problemei sigurantei rutiere si necesitatii tratarii ei ca prioritate nationala în managementul retelei rutiere a Republicii Moldova.
Lucrarea îsi propune sa popularizeze în rândul specialistilor moldoveni acele concepte si bune practici ingineresti pe care experienta internationala le-a relevat.
Manualul de Siguranta Rutiera se adreseaza specialistilor din domeniu, tuturor celor care sunt interesati de acest fenomen, în principal: specialistilor din cadrul Administratiei de Stat a Drumurilor din Republica Moldova si a structurilor componente din teritoriu; inginerilor proiectanti implicati în proiecte de infrastructura rutiera; specialistilor din cadrul Politiei Rutiere; arhitectilor urbanisti; studentilor.

- by Florentina-Alina Burlacu
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- Road safety, Road safety policy

Research shows that vehicle speed affects the severity of all road crashes. Higher speed crashes involve more kinetic energy: the more energy that is dispersed in a crash, the more severe that crash will be. Speed also affects the likelihood of a crash occurring in the first place. The likelihood of a serious or fatal crash increases significantly even with small increases in vehicle speed. Field studies demonstrate that a one percent increase in mean average speeds results in a roughly two percent increase in the frequency of crashes involving injury, a three percent increase in severe crashes, and a four percent increase in deaths. The safety of infrastructure is heavily influenced by traffic speed, to the extent that without a detailed understanding of speed limits and vehicle operating speeds, it is difficult to assess the safety performance of infrastructure at a given location. This report seeks to highlight the central role of speed management in the Safe System approach and ...

- by Florentina-Alina Burlacu
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- Road safety, Traffic Safety, Road safety policy, Road Infrastructure

This paper presents the actual speed management stage on public roads from Republic of Moldova and the author's vision to improve it. Based on the findings of state authorities that the main cause of several accidents is the inadequate speed, this paper presents a number of criteria and recommendations for speed management on the road and a proposal for an efficient speed management according to the best practices in the field. The paper presents a significant case study realized on a modernized road, which studies the correlation between speed legislation and capacity and the technical characteristics of the rehabilitated road for an efficient traffic fluidization. The results of the study were focused on proposals for re-evaluation of the speed management on public roads, including the re-evaluation of the network classification and establishing a unitary concept, in order to have proper safety and fluency of movement.

- by José Ignacio Nazif Munoz
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- Road safety, United Nations, Latin America, Road safety policy
- by José Ignacio Nazif Munoz
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- Geography, Road safety, United Nations, Latin America

A crash rate theory based on corporate economic utility maximization is applied to individual behavior in U.S. and German motorway death rates, by using wealth inhomogeneity data in ten-percentile bins to account for variations of utility maximization in the population. Germany and the U.S. have similar median wealth figures, a well-known indicator of accident risk, but different motorway death rates, considered a puzzle by some. It is found that inhomogeneity in roughly the 10th to 30th percentile, not revealed by popular measures such as the Gini index which focus on differences at the higher percentiles, provides a satisfactory explanation of the data. This suggests data on inequality at lower percentiles may indicate socioeconomic risk better than extremes in the upper percentile ranges, and that the U.S. socioeconomic risk may be higher than generally realized.

- by Robert Shuler
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- Automotive Systems Engineering, Psychology, Economics, Socioeconomics