Analyzing road safety indicator data across Europe: describing, explaining and comparing

Abstract

Road safety is a relevant theme receiving increasing attention worldwide. Due to the various factors that influence the road safety level in a country, it is a complex topic to study. The use of indicators describing a particular aspect in an understandable way is valuable in this respect. Consequently, a diverse set of road safety related indicators (including road safety outcome indicators, transport indicators, demographic indicators, etc) is formulated in this study and data are collected for a large set of European countries. Next, this indicator set is analysed to develop the profile of a country, to compare the road safety performance between countries and to assess the explanatory power of the different indicators in terms of the number of road fatalities per million inhabitants. For each country, the aspects on which it performs (relatively) well and the aspects deserving further attention can be revealed. This is illustrated for Belgium in this paper. Moreover, countries with a similar (e.g. road safety outcome or transport) performance can be grouped. Finally, insight into the most determinant indicators for the number of road fatalities per million inhabitants offers useful information.