Road Safety Target Setting in Europe based on a Combined Data Envelopment Analysis and Time Series Analysis Approach

Abstract

A quantitative number to aim at is a strong signal to people. Within the road safety field, as is the case in other domains, ambitious targets with respect to the maximum number of road fatalities are set, both at the European level (-50% over the period 2011-2020 (European Commission, 2010) and the national or regional level. Target setting has a number of advantages in terms of motivation, action and performance. It is important that targets take the specific situation of a country as well as the performance of other countries into account in order to set realistic and useful country-specific targets. In this respect, the technique of data envelopment analysis is useful. In particular, using the values from one or more benchmark countries, target values can be obtained for each inefficient country. In that case, the number of road fatalities in the European countries can be computed in case each member state in Europe would perform as efficiently as possible (i.e. a certain amount of participation in traffic resulting in as few as possible fatalities). Moreover, given that we are interested in a projection into the future (e.g. the 2015 target) the expected progress in road safety until 2015 should be incorporated in the analysis. This is where time series analysis comes into play. In this paper, the added value of time series analysis, which enables us to make prognoses based on the evolution in the past, and data envelopment analysis, which results in valuable target setting, are combined in order to derive road fatality targets for different member states of the European Union. These targets show inefficient countries the target they should aim for. This is not a general, theoretical number, yet an ambitious value to become a best performing country in Europe in the future.