This report contains a framework for cost-benefit analysis of the Dutch Road Safety Plan. The framework consists of the following main elements: (1) A short discussion of the implications for road safety policy of the Dutch concept of sustainable safety; (2) A discussion of formal techniques for priority setting, the kinds of information required to use these techniques and their limitations; (3) A survey of potentially effective road safety measures and the screening of these measures for inclusion in formal analysis of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit ratio; (4) A critical examination of current Dutch road accident costs and a preliminary revision of these costs; (5) A summary of evidence concerning the safety effects of road safety measures subjected to analyses of their cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit ratios; and (6) Preliminary estimates of the cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit at ratio at different levels of applications of different measures and their benefit-cost. It is argued that the main implications of the concept of sustainable safety for road safety policy are: (1) that road safety policy should be based on ambitious, long term policy targets aiming at a radical reduction in the number of injuries, to take account of the fact that future generations are likely to put an even higher value on safety than the current generation; (2) that it is important to use safety measures as efficiently as possible, to minimize the amount of resources consumed by road safety; and (3) that there ought to be more room for experimenting with new measures, subject to the condition that the results of those experiments are always evaluated and the results of the evaluations made public.
Samenvatting