Regional differences in relation with road safety : more detailed exploration based on actual practice in three municipalities in the Dutch province Zeeland. Since the early 1990s, road safety policy in the Netherlands has become increasingly decentralized, because, among other things, this offers the possibility of tailoring policy to the specific regional characteristics. This raises the question whether road safety policy in one region should indeed have different emphases than policy in another. The present research is a second exploratory study into the extent to which area-related differences coincide with differences in relation with road safety. The results of this study are intended to make a contribution to the knowledge and methods for region-specific policy. The central research questions that have been used are: 1. Which characteristics are important for road safety to allow defining a convenient number of homogeneous areas that can be used in practice? 2. Which are the similarities and differences between different homogeneous areas in relation with road safety? The ultimate purpose is to be able to benchmark the road safety conditions in municipalities. This requires being able to compare municipalities with a group of similar municipalities. Similar to the first exploration by Houwing et al. (2012), the present outlook also investigates which basic characteristics of municipalities (structural and possibly also cultural characteristics of municipalities) are connected with road safety. These characteristics of municipalities were then used to divide them into groups of similar municipalities. The central question in this outlook was whether the municipal officials could recognize themselves in the idea that they belong to a group of similar (homogeneous) municipalities (according to one of the categories that were identified in Houwing et al., 2012). This is important to generate support among policy officials if the findings from this study are to be used for a yet to be developed benchmark for road safety policy. If the officials’ opinions are found to differ, which then are the characteristics in which they believe their municipality differs from the other municipalities in the same group? And can a different categorization of homogeneous municipalities be made that gives a better reflection of the officials’ ideas? In the present outlook, interviews with three municipalities were used as well as supplementary data, and these were used as a basis for a new categorization of municipalities. The municipalities in which the interviews were conducted are Goes, Veere and Kapelle, all situated in the province of Zeeland and, according to Houwing et al. (2012) all belonging to the group of rural municipalities with a fairly extensive road network, both urban and rural.
Abstract