Both in Germany and in the international context, efforts are being made to further improve road safety, particularly with regard to reducing the number of people killed or seriously injured in road traffic. This is reflected in national road safety strategies, which are based on Vision Zero or a Safe System approach. Against this background, the organised stakeholders in the field of road safety at supranational level and in national jurisdictions are intensively engaged in safety performance initiatives as a possible component of proactive road safety work. This intensity is also reflected in the number of publications available. Within the scope of the project work documented in this report, 120 safety performance indicators from 24 countries were identified and systematically evaluated. The high number of SPIs is reflected in a wide range of the problem areas of traffic safety work they cover. The overall view of the identified SPIs highlights the dominance of indicators in the strategic field of traffic behaviour, with a focus on the use of protection systems. In the strategic field of road infrastructure, road safety equipment is most frequently addressed by means of SPIs; in the strategic field of vehicle technology, indicators on safety equipment / vehicle safety rating dominate. However, there is also a high degree of heterogeneity with regard to the degree of implementation in the respective national context and concretely with regard to: • the integration of SPIs into a road safety strategy or their alignment with transport policy measures; • the setting of target values for SPIs; • active SPI monitoring; • the evaluation of the monitoring or the reflection of its results in the form of road safety measures. Other factors that make international comparability of SPIs difficult are the different content of the indicators (comprehensive indicator or subindicators), different documentation density (searchable sources) or sometimes an understanding of SPIs that refers to the 'final outcome' rather than to aspects of the 'intermediate outcome'. The legal framework, e.g. the admissibility of certain survey methods, such as random breath testing in flowing traffic (so-called roadside surveys) or the use of photographs or films, can also influence the collection of SPIs and the design of the national “intermediate outcome” or the international comparability of the national SPIs. Further challenges in project management were the availability of literature sources (reports, especially so-called 'grey literature', are often only available in the national language) and difficulties in contacting national experts. The obvious heterogeneity of the national SPIs, as documented in the report and its annex, makes international comparisons of the safety performance indicators already conceived or proposed difficult. Without being able to examine the reasons for the different differentiation of the respective national SPI systems in detail, this situation refers to the lack of implementation of a comprehensive system (standards) for the collection of SPIs and, in some cases, the orientation of country-specific stakeholders towards national road safety problems. Against this background, the commitment of European institutions to the definition of basic standards – whether in the form of the findings of the EU project SafetyNet, in the orientation towards the ESRA methodology, or in the form of concrete SPI proposals – appears to be appropriate for the future collection of SPIs. The international experience with the use of SPIs in road safety work gathered in this report is documented in three ways: in text form – both as country (brief) information and by means of a documentation sheet for each indicator – and electronically in the form of an Excel database. For the current discussion on the development of a suitable SPI concept and corresponding indicators for the Federal Republic of Germany, these materials offer a variety of starting points with regard to the conception, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of potential safety performance indicators. (Author/publisher)
Abstract