The aim of WP4 is to bridge the gap between research and policy to enable knowledge-based road safety management. To support road safety decision makers, this Work Package will: (1) exploit the data available for analysis by providing forecasts of the road safety situation in the different member states and, possibly, the whole of Europe; and (2) work on the development of ready-to-use instruments. Tools that were well-appreciated in the past will be standardised and complemented by new tools. This will be done in close communication with the end-users themselves. The end-users mainly concern the policy makers, but may in some cases also concern users from research and the industry. Objectives and overview of the present deliverable: Roads and road transport play a central role in Western societies, but the benefits have come at a cost. In addition to the obvious costs of building roads and vehicles and providing fuel, there are various less obvious costs: human and environmental. We focus here on road crashes and in particular on the fatalities resulting from them, which are the unintended consequences of the road transport system. The frequency of crashes and the number of fatalities change over time. In fact in most European countries, the number of fatalities has decreased in recent years. It is important to monitor these developments, focusing on a number of key questions * Has there been a continuous, smooth development or were there abrupt changes? * If there were changes, were they due to changes in the actual risk of having (fatal) crashes or were they due to changes in traffic volume? * Where does the present development (if continued) get us? (Author/publisher)
Abstract