Road safety can be assessed in terms of the social costs of crashes and injuries. However, simply counting crashes or injuries is an imperfect indicator of the level of road safety. When crashes occur it is the “worst case scenario” of insecure operational conditions of road traffic. Work Package 3 of SafetyNet deals with Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs). A Safety Performance Indicator is any variable, which is used in addition to the figures of crashes or injuries to measure changes in the operational conditions of road traffic.
SPIs can give a more complete picture of the level of road safety and can detect the emergence of problems at an early stage, before these problems result in crashes. They use qualitative and quantitative information to help determine a road safety programmes’ success in achieving its objectives.
Goal
One of the main goals of SafetyNet WP3 is to develop a uniform methodology for measuring a coherent set of safety performance indicators in each of the 25 Member States and some non-EU Members. This report provides the first ideas from the WP3 team on this subject.
The SafetyNet team will move on to the other goals (offering technical assistance to some Member States that fail in producing the SPI data according to the developed uniform methodology & collecting current data on SPIs that meet the standards of the uniform methodology) at a later stage in the project.
Research areas
Work Package 3 of SafetyNet investigates SPIs in seven different road safety areas.
- Alcohol & Drug use
- Speeds
- Protective systems
- Daytime Running Lights
- Vehicles
- Roads
- Trauma management
State of the art report
This report starts off with a description of the general methodology. Then, the report describes the state of the art in the seven research areas. Firstly, the theoretical backgrounds of each research area are given. Secondly, the first results from the questionnaire (that was sent to 27 countries: the 25 EU Member States, plus Switzerland and Norway) are presented. And thirdly, the first ideas on the details of the SPIs that could be used in the future are described.
Summary Task 4: Daytime Running Lights (Chapter 7)
Many traffic crashes occur because road users do not notice each other in time or do not notice each other at all. This is true not only for traffic crashes in the dark but for traffic crashes in daylight as well. Vehicle visibility is therefore one of the factors which affects the number of crashes. The basic idea in developing the SPI for Daytime Running Lights (DRL) is the relation between the level of use of DRL and the size of the effect on safety (The daytime visibility of motor vehicles cannot be measured directly but the level of use of DRL can).
An indicator for DRL can thus be considered an indirect indicator for visibility. For this sub-problem an appropriate indicator was developed. The indicator is based on the relation between the level of the use of the DRL and the effect on multiparty daytime crashes (MPDA). The indicator has been identified on the basis of literature survey and the current practice.
