The European Road Safety Observatory was established European Commission and first announced in the 2001 Transport White Paper1. It was further developed in the 2003 Road Safety Action Plan 2 where the Commission announced it was to establish a new European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO) to "co-ordinate all Community activities in the fields of road accident and injury data collection and analysis". The framework of ERSO was established within the EU FP 6 funded project SafetyNet (2004 — 2008) which developed and validated standard protocols for core data and knowledge tools. At the completion of the project the data and knowledge developed by SafetyNet ERSO had been incorporated within the website of DG-MOVE. The DaCoTA project has been established with the support of DG-MOVE to further develop the content of the Observatory with additional data types and output tools. There are six areas of work which are summarised below. Road safety management is the process by which road safety policies are generated, implemented and monitored. They include institutional actions, implementation of measures and monitoring of intermediate and final outcomes. The institutional structures involved include national and local government, infrastructure operators, vehicle regulators, traffic enforcement, training agencies and other stakeholders. There is a variation in approach across the EU 27 yet there is little information that characterises the key aspects of the approach not quantitative information linking these characteristics to road safety outcomes. The DaCoTA team has systematically gathered information from a selection of 14 EU Member States using a specially designed questionnaire based on a model of road safety. Analysis of the results showed that there was no one single “good practise” model of road safety management that could be related to road safety outcomes. It was considered this was a result of the similarities between the countries evaluated and the comparison of the “snapshot” of the census and the decade of casualty reduction totals. It was however possible to identify a relationship between certain characteristics of road safety management and road safety performance indicators — the operational conditions of road safety. This is in accordance with the Sunflower model that assumes the policy context and input will first affect intermediate outcomes. The evidence base is a key factor in ERSO and for road safety policymaking and the DaCoTA team also reviewed the data needs of key stakeholder groups. A web-based questionnaire was completed by over 500 road safety stakeholders who were asked to identify the nature and availability of the most important types of safety data. The highest priority data needs were: 1. Information on crash causation factors (high priority for 67% of respondents) 2. Information on road users' behaviour and attitudes (63%), 3. A common definition of a fatality (60%), 4. Information on the costs and benefits of road safety measures (56%) 5. Serious injury counts, in addition to fatality counts (55%), 6. Methods to evaluate the safety impacts of road safety measures (54%) 7. Information on the safety impacts of combined measures (54%), 8. Common methods to perform evaluations of road safety measures (52%) The review of policymakers data needs identified a major gap in availability of in-depth data that describes the causes of accidents and injuries. This data is typically gathered by attending the crash scene in time where specialist teams take measurements of the crash scene, interview participants and witnesses and inspect vehicles. Such data is heavily used by vehicle manufacturers, highway operators and increasingly the insurance industry. It directly impacts on automotive regulations and consumer rating systems such as EuroNCAP. Each investigation may involve several thousand data items to be completed and so the numbers of cases gathered are considerably fewer than in national accident databases. Indepth data is gathered by a small group of countries including the UK, Germany and Sweden however the data gathered even by only these three countries is incompatible and does not reflect the EU situation. Two main barriers to representative data concern the lack of a harmonised protocol and the absence of suitable crash investigation teams. The DaCoTA team has addressed these obstacles and Europe is now ready to conduct systematic in-depth investigations of accident and injury causation. The main outputs are listed. 1. A validated protocol covering all aspects of data collection including data specifications, case sampling and crash investigation methods. This includes the definitions of over 1,500 variables that can be completed for each crash. 2. A Wiki-based glossary of the data openly available at http://dacota-investigationmanual.eu/ 3. An open-access database system to the data protocol ready for users to populate with their own data. 4. A network of teams in 19 EU Member States, each trained and having implemented the local infrastructure necessary for pilot investigations. Many of these teams have national support for future data gathering. 5. A set of pilot cases gathered by the teams to demonstrate the capability to investigate collisions. The next step to initiate investigations of accident and injury causation at European-scale is to identify a suitable funding mechanism from a routine or research budget to support the teams. (Author/publisher)
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