The main role of traffic enforcement is seen as deterring road users from committing offences, which can be related to road crashes and injuries. To apply effective enforcement strategies and tactics, the enforcement activity needs to be systematically monitored. As this concerns, to a great extent, the enforcement effects, monitoring enforcement implies monitoring the actual levels of non-compliance and assessing the impact of enforcement operations on road users behaviours and road traffic safety. At present, the majority of enforcement activities are not assessed in a systematic manner. Normally, as to especially routine police enforcement, no data analysis precedes the activity, no quantitative targets are set, no specific methods are selected, and no monitoring is carried out. Moreover, across the EU as a whole, police enforcement activity is not always considered as an integral part of traffic safety policy, due to little co-ordination between road safety experts and police staff. At the same time, some countries (e.g. Finland, The Netherlands, Sweden) have already developed elements of monitoring mechanisms and a distribution of their experiences could be of help for other countries. Concerning specific police enforcement projects, different methods have been developed to assess the enforcement effects. Although most of the methods are suitable for evaluation purposes, there is an obvious need for a minimum common standard concerning methodological issues like research design, data collection, sampling strategies etc. Moreover, non-compliance data are often missing or defined in sitespecific terms; another widespread problem is that the base level of enforcement and the actual performance of the project are not documented in sufficient detail. Therefore, within ESCAPE Workpackage 6 it was initiated to: ! summarise a set of basic recommendations to be applicable when planning and performing police enforcement projects based on the research literature and own practical experiences, and develop the background for a synthesis of methodological guidelines for monitoring routine police enforcement based on practical measures of non-compliance in driver behaviour and other available data. (Author/publisher) For an overview off all working papers and deliverables of the ESCAPE project, see http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj6/escape/deliver.htm
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