Building the European Road Safety Observatory. SafetyNet. Deliverable D3.1 State of the art report on road safety performance indicators

General Road safety can be assessed in terms of the social costs of crashes and injuries. However, simply counting crashes or injuries is an imperfect indicator of the level of road safety. When crashes occur it is the “worst case scenario” of insecure operational conditions of road traffic. Work Package 3 of SafetyNet deals with Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs). A Safety Performance Indicator is any variable, which is used in addition to the figures of crashes or injuries to measure changes in the operational conditions of road traffic. SPIs can give a more complete picture of the level of road safety and can detect the emergence of problems at an early stage, before these problems result in crashes. They use qualitative and quantitative information to help determine a road safety programmes’ success in achieving its objectives. Goal One of the main goals of SafetyNet WP3 is to develop a uniform methodology for measuring a coherent set of safety performance indicators in each of the 25 Member States and some non-EU Members. This report provides the first ideas from the WP3 team on this subject. The SafetyNet team will move on to the other goals (offering technical assistance to some Member States that fail in producing the SPI data according to the developed uniform methodology & collecting current data on SPIs that meet the standards of the uniform methodology) at a later stage in the project