The Austrian federal Ministry for transport, Innovation and technology (BMVIT) has been publishing an annual report on road safety in Austria since 2007. these reports afford a yearly look at road safety work in Austria and provide an overview of current trends in accident statistics 1. the 2012 annual report has been completely redesigned and focuses on the realization of the Austrian Road Safety Programme 2011—2020 2, the implementation of the measures planned in its individual areas of intervention and the resulting successes in reducing the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities on Austria’s roads. this new structure will also be maintained in the reports that will be published in the coming years. the report thus provides support to researchers, practitioners and decision-makers in developing, planning and implementing further road safety measures. this, in turn, establishes the basis for achieving the ambitious goals set in the Road Safety Programme for the period to 2020 — and allows any necessary adaptations to the programme to be made in a timely manner. The Austrian Road Safety Programme 2011-2020 stipulated the implementation of an electronic accident data collection system as part of the ADM (accident data Management) project. the goal was to create a new basis for the accident data collection system. to achieve this, BMVIT and BMI have established the necessary technical solutions for electronic accident data collection. Since 1 January 2012, the police officers who respond to a traffic accident record the details of injury accidents on Austria’s roads electronically via the ADM system and subsequently forward them to Statistics Austria (Bundesanstalt Statistik Österreich). the electronic ADM system replaces the former manual recording of accident data via accident statistics report forms. While the actual accidents themselves are recorded on the spot, i.e. as soon as possible after they occur, the full details of the incident may be entered into the system in stages. the change in the accident data collection method means that a direct comparison with previous annual figures is not possible from 2012 onwards. one key change is that all accidents are now assigned spatial coordinates using a geographic information system (GIS), a development which could significantly aid the identification of high accident concentration sections of the road network in future. the accident data collection catalogue has been updated in line with road safety and accident research requirements and considerably extended in comparison to the data previously collected via the accident statistics report. the classification of accident type is now also carried out on site by the police officers who respond to and record the accident. a further accident data collection measure stipulated in the RSP 2011-2020 is to improve accident databases, with a particular focus on localisation, the categorisation of the causes of accidents and harmonised data collection. In the future, BMVIT, the individual federal states, the municipalities and ASFINAG should produce a joint accident, traffic and roads database for Austria. Work is already in progress to extend the ADM system for use in managing road sections with a high accident concentration. ASFINAG is also actively supporting the graph integration platform projects and in-depth investigations of fatal accidents on motorways and expressways. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting