The Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA) was set up in 1993 `to undertake activities that promote safety in land transport at reasonable cost' (Land Transport Act 1993). This objective obliges the LTSA to develop and implement safety programmes which generate a net safety benefit to the nation. To this end the LTSA is developing a procedure to allocate road safety resources optimally and it has presented a framework for this in its second edition of Safety Directions (LTSA 1995). This paper describes the LTSAs work since then and the resource allocation model which has come out of it. The model is intended to apply eventually to most road safety spending, which in New Zealand accounts for about half of all expenditure on roads (figure 1). However, it can be regarded as a specific case of a more generalised model which could be applied to non-safety road spending as well. This paper therefore discusses three increasingly specialised versions of the model: a) A `generalised model' which applies in principle to all road spending on engineering, enforcement and traffic management; that is, the bulk of all road spending; b) A `road safety model' which applies to spending on road safety engineering, enforcement, and some educational programmes; and c) An `enforcement model' which applies only to road safety enforcement by means of police patrol. So far only the enforcement model has been empirically estimated and used. However, the other two models are presented in this paper because they help us to understand the nature and potential of future developments. The only type of road expenditure which cannot in principle be modelled is expenditure which is non-spatial, such as licensing, vehicle standards, and certain education and publicity programmes. In future the models may be adapted to include them, but currently they must be evaluated by other means. (A)
Abstract