Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1942/18108
Title: Serious Injuries: An Additional Indicator to Fatalities for Road Safety Benchmarking
Authors: SHEN, Yongjun 
HERMANS, Elke 
BAO, Qiong 
BRIJS, Tom 
WETS, Geert 
Issue Date: 2015
Publisher: TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC
Source: TRAFFIC INJURY PREVENTION, 16 (3), p. 246-253
Abstract: Objectives: Almost all of the current road safety benchmarking studies focus entirely on fatalities, which, however, represent only one measure of the magnitude of the road safety problem. The main objective of this article was to investigate the possibility of including the number of serious injuries in addition to the number of fatalities for road safety benchmarking and to further illuminate its impact on the countries' rankings. Methods: We introduced the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to the road safety domain and developed a DEA-based road safety model (DEA-RS) in this study. Moreover, we outlined different types of possible weight restrictions and adopted 2 of them to indicate the relationship between road fatalities and serious injuries for the sake of rational benchmarking. One was a relative weight restriction based on the information of their shadow price, and the other was a virtual weight restriction using a priori knowledge about the importance level of these 2 aspects. Results: By computing the most optimal road safety risk scores of 10 European countries based on the different models, we found that United Kingdom was the only best-performing country no matter which model was utilized. However, countries such as The Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland were no longer best-performing when the serious injuries were integrated. On the contrary, Spain, which ranked almost at the bottom among all of the countries when only the number of road fatalities was considered, became a relatively well-performing country when integrating its number of serious injuries in the evaluation. In general, no matter whether the country's road safety ranking was improved or deteriorated, most of the countries achieved a higher risk score when the number of serious injuries was included, which implied that compared to the road fatalities, more policy attention has to be paid to improve the situation of serious injuries in most countries. Conclusions: Given the importance of considering the serious injuries in addition to the fatalities for international benchmarking of road safety, the proposed model (i.e., the DEA-RS model with weight restrictions) turned out to be effective in deriving reasonable results. We are thereby also inspired to apply this kind of model to a more complete road safety benchmarking practice in the future when the data on, for example, the number of slight injuries, the degree of property damage, and the number of crashes are ready (i.e., comparable) to use.
Notes: [Shen, Yongjun; Hermans, Elke; Bao, Qiong; Brijs, Tom; Wets, Geert] Hasselt Univ, Transportat Res Inst IMOB, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium.
Keywords: road safety benchmarking; fatalities; serious injuries; data envelopment analysis; weight restrictions; country ranking;serious injuries; country ranking; data envelopment analysis; fatalities; weight restrictions; road safety benchmarking
Document URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1942/18108
ISSN: 1538-9588
e-ISSN: 1538-957X
DOI: 10.1080/15389588.2014.930831
ISI #: 000345832100006
Rights: Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Category: A1
Type: Journal Contribution
Validations: ecoom 2016
Appears in Collections:Research publications

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