Building road safety models to improve traffic safety in Hochiminh City, Vietnam

Abstract

Improving road safety is one of the most important public health issues and government priorities of all countries in the world, especially in emerging countries. Over the past 26 years of reformed economic development, Vietnam’s road safety problems have constantly been a national challenge which not only required efforts by the Vietnamese government, but which also attracted more and more special interest within the scientific research community. In reality, a lot of road safety related research has been carried out in recent years. However, most research simply focuses on generic issues without feasible applicable models and lack sufficiently solid data to apply these models. In addition, most of the latest research proposed subjective implementation solutions. This thesis aims to develop comprehensive models that have a high applicability and propose efficient solutions to Vietnam’s road safety problems. In general, it has a holistically systematic approach that is shown in the objectives oriented knowledge framework (Figure S1), including 5 functional layers: The envisioning layer essentially sets the direction and defines the thesis objectives, problems and scope to common goals of Vietnam’s road safety. The purpose of the model design layer is to analyze and select appropriate road safety models from 3 model groups which identify different related variables and factors  The model execution layer includes the process and practices to practically execute the designed models in real-life applications. All models in execution and testing will use data from the database development layer where data was collected as raw data and was consequently consolidated, analyzed and developed through many cycles of data. The implementation layer is the functional layer where solutions and community campaigns are developed and proposed using results from the model execution layer and database layer together with social marketing model techniques. At the center of the thesis there are three main model groups, i.e. statistical models, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and road user behavior models. These allow us to specifically analyze road safety efficiency, predict the number of fatalities, injuries, accidents and traffic violations and finally propose road safety community campaigns to raise awareness among road users in Vietnam. There is a combination and integration across the 3 groups of models where the output of previous models is selected as input for study in the other models.