This report describes a repeated study into aspects of traffic safety policy in dutch municipalities. The study was carried out by means of a postal questionnaire survey in which 59% of all dutch municipalities took part. A still growing part of all municipalities have a special traffic safety co-ordinator (89%) or a traffic safety committee (67%). In general, municipality policy effort in the field of traffic safety continues to increase and 46% of the municipalities assess the priority given to their traffic safety policy as high or very high. Measures to increase traffic safety are taken at a large scale. This pertains to educational measures (61% of all municipalities), enforcement measures (62%), as well as infrastructural measures (96%). However, there is little insight into the effects of the measures taken. All the same, this limited insight does not prevent municipalities from keeping new measures and from believing in a (further) decrease in numbers of traffic casualties. The four main problem areas reported by the municipalities are, just as in previous years, `speeding', `black spots', bicyclists' and `youngsters'. The quality index discussed in this report enables one to express the quality of municipal traffic safety policy in one figure. The mean score on this index is increasing further and is 5% higher now than it was in 1994. The maximum score, however, has not been reached by far. (A)
Abstract