Advancements in Road Safety Management Analysis

Road Safety Management (RSM) can be briefly defined as the tasks of preparing and implementing road safety policies. Many studies have been carried out on RSM, trying to identify success factors and reference best practice examples, but the complexity of the subject and the difficulty of quantitative data collection make it difficult a clear and comprehensive understanding. According to the EC-funded DACOTA research project, the weakest components of RSM systems in Europe are policy implementation and funding and the lack of knowledge-based road safety policy making. The main objective of the research, undertaken within the FERSI's working group on Road Safety Management (RSM), is to better investigate in several European countries those two RSM key functions: funding and research. Particularly the study aims at 1) exploring the existing structures, processes and factors affecting funding and research performances; 2) defining an assessment framework able to measure single country performances with reference to the efficiency and effectiveness of road safety funding and research, possibly shifting from a qualitative to a more quantitative approach. Based on the available knowledge on these two topics (research and funding), an assessment framework is defined and a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators for funding and research performance measurement is proposed. A desk analysis aiming at collecting available data useful to estimate the proposed indicators is conducted and a preliminary analysis with this subset of indicators is undertaken. A subset of research indicators (bibliometric) are used to estimate road safety research outputs performance of a country in terms of productivity and quality of research and international collaboration activities. Preliminary results show a positive correlation among them, even if the linear correlation turns to be not so strong. Countries are ranked on the basis of a composite index of all the three indicators.