SWOV’s research programme 2007-2010 consists of ten sub-programmes, and Roads and Traffic is one of them. This programme, among other things, aims at providing knowledge on the effects of road and traffic characteristics on road safety. Through this knowledge, the infrastructure can be further improved. Research database is a project within Roads and Traffic. In this project, data needs to be acquired for research into the effects of road and traffic characteristics on road safety. The quality and quantity of such data decide to an important degree how accurately possible effects can be determined. Therefore this project focuses on the development of a database in which characteristics of roads and the traffic on them, as well as the crashes that occur on these roads, are registered. Such a database has already been available in the United States since late 1980s: the Highway Safety Information System (HSIS). The HSIS is part of a program of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), in which knowledge concerning road safety should be developed. In the HSIS, road, crashes and traffic data of nine states are registered: Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Utah, California, North Carolina, Washington State and Ohio. Since 2006, two urban centres have also been available in the HSIS, namely Bangor in Maine and Charlotte in North Carolina. The data that the states and municipalities provided to the HSIS is not specifically collected for the HSIS; it only uses and combines existing data. Since the HSIS appears to have characteristics that are desirable for the research database of SWOV, a pilot study to this system was performed. The results are in this report.
Samenvatting