The aim of this study is to describe road safety in the ten participating countries, determine the underlying elements and developments in the current strategies and action plans, and explore how these are effective in improving road safety. These insights can be helpful for any individual country that decides to learn from good experiences and results from another country. All ten countries made a start with designing and implementing road safety strategies and several good initiatives and promising developments are identified, but positive results cannot be traced yet in official crash statistics and not one of the ten countries is an outperformer or ‘best-in-class’. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay have different levels of safety. Road safety takes different forms in different countries, and there are different factors to consider. Road safety action plans differ in focus according to the size and nature of problems in the ten participating countries, but also according to the level of maturity of road safety capabilities to address the road safety problem. Policy areas targeted are rather similar in all participating countries. A common denominator for all countries (perhaps with the exception of Cuba until now) is a sharp increase of motorisation (including increasing proportions of motorcycles). Furthermore, young growing populations are significantly increasing exposure to the risk of road traffic injury across all countries. These developments are placing significant demands on the road traffic systems within the ten countries, and those systems are failing to safely cope. This means that we conclude that Latin America has a significant road safety problem and that substantial actions are needed to reduce the road safety toll and to reach the targets as set by the United Nations under the Sustainable Development Goals. This study presents a variety of interventions for the ten countries and for individual countries on how to improve. Benchmarking The methodological approach to assess road safety performance relies on a benchmarking process through which participants are evaluated on various aspects of their performance in relation to others, and so helps identify best in class practices and performances. Most importantly these ten Latin American countries can use the study results to learn from each other. Carrying out the study was an excellent way for all participating countries to understand why good road safety data are essential and needed to support policy making. In itself, the study represents progress in road safety cooperation and learning across the ten countries. This reflects the important role that the Ibero-American Road Safety Observatory (OISEVI) has played by encouraging countries to begin collecting road safety data and information. The benchmarking methodology is data-intensive. Three types of performance indicators are used: final road safety outcomes (the number of people killed in road crashes), intermediate outcomes (also called safety performance indicators indicating the safety quality of system components, such as road user behaviour, roads, vehicles and post-crash care), and road safety management indicators (such as strategies, action plans and programmes, resources, and institutional settings). All these indicators are considered against a background of road transport systems in the ten countries. Unfortunately it was not possible to include information on traffic injuries in this study due to the lack of good and comparable data on this. The study began by dividing the ten countries into two groups with some unifying similarities among the countries (ITF, 2016). The idea behind grouping countries is that comparable countries can more easily learn from each other. However, when exploring grouping, it appeared that this was not a feasible and meaningful way forward. After describing and comparing performance across all ten countries, and failing to identify a ‘best-in-class’, we decided to compare performance in Latin America with performance in other parts of the world (Europe, North-America, Australasia). (Author/publisher)
Abstract