In December 1997, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) identified rural road safety as a major problem among member countries. An expert group was created to quantify the problem. The ensuing report, Safety Strategies for Rural Roads, which was published in 1999, demonstrated that fatalities from crashes on rural roads (identified as “those roads outside of urban areas that are not motorways or unpaved roads”) were gradually increasing. Such fatalities had increased from fewer than 55% of total traffic fatalities in 1980 to more than 60% in 1996. The report also identified three principal collision configuration types that accounted for approximately 80% of all fatal rural road collisions. These were single-vehicle incidents, particularly ”run off the road” occurrences (at least 35% of fatal rural road crashes), head-on collisions (almost 25% of fatal collisions on rural roads) and collisions at intersections (approximately 20% of fatal crashes on rural roads). The authors of the report also cited a general lack of explicit safety policies or targets designed for rural roads in most OECD member countries and recommended the implementation of short-, medium- and long-term interventions to address this gradually growing problem. Australia is an exception in this respect. It developed a safety action plan in the mid-1990s that focused on road and road user issues most critical to its rural population. In Canada, the high number of fatalities and serious injuries occurring annually on rural undivided roadways was also identified as one its principal road safety problems. One of the areas targeted for fatality and serious injury reductions under Canada’s national road safety plan – Road Safety Vision 2010 – is rural roadways. The target calls for 40% decreases in the number of fatalities and serious injuries during the 2008-2010 period over the 1996-2001-baseline period. The most recent crash data (2004) show that fatalities and serous injuries account for 52% and 31% of total victims, respectively. The objectives of this report are twofold. The first objective is to closely examine elements from Transport Canada’s national Traffic Accident Injury Data (TRAID) file, focusing on the three main problem areas identified in the OECD report on rural road safety (single-vehicle, head-on and intersection crashes) and, if possible, to provide explanations for the casualty trends on rural roads. The second objective of this paper is to identify potential strategies, based on the casualty trend analysis, to make rural road travel safer in Canada. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting