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 6: Roads (Chapter 9)
Infrastructure layout and design has a strong impact on the safety performance of the road transport system. Many ongoing practises in infrastructure research apply sampling of casualty data for safety assessment. In addition, crash prevention can be improved by early assessments of safety hazards e.g. by monitoring the physical appearance of the road environment and the operational conditions of traffic. This is what Safety Performance Indicators (SPI) dedicated to roads are aiming at.
A methodology for network description and (safety related) road classification has been developed, that is assumed to be suitable for international harmonisation. As a basis, the functionality of a connection (consisting out of one or more road types) and a systematic combination of present (safety related) characteristics has been used.
At this stage of the project only a few countries are able to provide requested data on both connection types, road types and other road design characteristics. Part of this may be due to the fact that no complete systematic information on the performance of the roads is routinely available in the majority of countries. Hence, special efforts will need to be undertaken to collect these data.
Based on the present country responses it can be stated that the suggested sets of SPIs seem to be realisable and promising for comparing road networks and road design in the Member States.
