Safety, road benchmarking

During these overseas experiences and our visits to different countries, I had the opportunity to discuss road safety development with local professionals and consultants. There I also had the opportunities to attend various conferences, seminars and workshops and to hsten to experts from different countries. This was a rewarding learning experience, which was especially meaningful for me in terms of future contacts. There were always questions raised during this work, for instance, how do we define and measure road safety development in a country How do we determine the progress this country has achieved How do we estabhsh targets for road safety improvement in a country Until now, there is no simple answer to these questions. This has inspired me to develop sets of macro-indicators that can be used as appropriate benchmarks to compare the performance of different countries. I started to use previous results of the projects as a point of departure, in order to build a model from the conclusions drawn. 

The purpose of this chapter is to give a literature survey of the most important macro factors and concepts in road accidents. It describes the road safety problem as a junction of three dimensions (exposure, risk and consequences). The chapter discusses the relationship between different factors and accident risk. This will be useful to choose the most important performance indicators that could be used as benchmarks in international comparisons. I also give a brief literature review of the most important and/or recent macroscopic models in road safety that are used for describing the development in road safety in a country and internationally. Finally, I conclude this chapter with important notes regarding under-reporting of data and the correction factor. 

The proposed index in this study is the development of Road Safety Development Index (RSDI), which has been initiated from a desire to create a benchmark of national performance and development in road safety and to rank country s level on a global scale and over a time period. The first outline of the RSDI is shown in (A1 Haji Asp, 2003). 

The SUNflower approach was first presented in 2002 (Koomstra et al., 2002), when the road safety efforts of the three safest countries worldwide were compared Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The main aim of this comparison was to acquire better insight into the policy development processes of these three countries. It was hoped that this comparison would identify the crucial points that had made it possible for these nations to improve their respective road safety records, and to learn how further improvements could be achieved. Later, this approach was expanded to include nine countries (Wegman et al., 2008). These efforts eventually resulted in a proposal to benchmark the safety performance of countries and jurisdictions (states within countries, provinces) using a composite road safety performance index (Wegman et al., 2008 Wegman and Oppe, 2010). 

Wegman, F., and Oppe, S. 2010. Benchmarking road safety performance of countries. Safety Science, 48, 1203-1211. 

Fault injection is an effective and widely used method for test, assessment and dependability benchmarking of fault-tolerant and fail-safe systems. The inclusion of fault injection as a highly recommended assessment method in the recently published ISO 26262 standard [1] for functional safety of road vehicles is an example of the increasing use and importance of fault injection in the embedded systems industry. 

When benchmarking, both transport safety and personal safety rates are valuable comparators but, as Table 3.2 clearly shows, must also include an examination of the trends in absolute numbers. As nations road transport systems grow and mature, there is inexorable improvement in both rates, improvement that can obscure a relative lack of improvement compared with what others achieve. 

Dann, S., and M.-L. Fry. Benchmarking road safety success Issues to consider. Australian Marketing Journal, 2009,17 226-231. 

Road Safety Auditors have an international benchmark that can be used to independently measure the overall safety of a project. 

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