Building the European Road Safety Observatory. SafetyNet. Deliverable D3.1 State of the art report on road safety performance indicators

Abstract

General\nRoad safety can be assessed in terms of the social costs of crashes and\ninjuries. However, simply counting crashes or injuries is an imperfect indicator\nof the level of road safety. When crashes occur it is the “worst case scenario” of\ninsecure operational conditions of road traffic. Work Package 3 of SafetyNet\ndeals with Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs). A Safety Performance\nIndicator is any variable, which is used in addition to the figures of crashes or\ninjuries to measure changes in the operational conditions of road traffic.\nSPIs can give a more complete picture of the level of road safety and can detect\nthe emergence of problems at an early stage, before these problems result in\ncrashes. They use qualitative and quantitative information to help determine a\nroad safety programmes’ success in achieving its objectives.\nGoal\nOne of the main goals of SafetyNet WP3 is to develop a uniform methodology\nfor measuring a coherent set of safety performance indicators in each of the 25\nMember States and some non-EU Members. This report provides the first ideas\nfrom the WP3 team on this subject.\nThe SafetyNet team will move on to the other goals (offering technical\nassistance to some Member States that fail in producing the SPI data according\nto the developed uniform methodology & collecting current data on SPIs that\nmeet the standards of the uniform methodology) at a later stage in the project.