Why an evaluation of traffic safety measures?

Traffic safety is a major preoccupation in most countries, and the high cost of road accidents justifies that large sums of money should be spent on safety research and safety countermeasures. Now, how to use the money as efficiently as possible? How to reach the best results in terms of numbers of lives saved and accidents avoided? How to assess these results? How to improve future safety policies? It is clear that there is a need for evaluation studies and definition of evaluation processes, adequately designed to answer the various preoccupations of researchers and policy-makers. The purpose of this paper is to list some of these preoccupations, find out which forms of evaluation are best suited to bring an answer to them, and state (briefly) which kind of data is required to perform the task. It is hoped that it will contribute to promoting a better evaluation of safety work, which will be a help for research and increase the general efficiency of safety action.(a) for the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD abstract no 264967.