Session 18 – Road Safety Management

Dalibor Pešić and Andrijana Pešić – Monitoring of Road Safety Performance Indicators – current situation and trends in the Republic of Serbia / Republic of Serbia started to monitor road safety performance indicators (RSPIs) in 2013. After comprehensive study, Road Traffic Safety Agency and University of Belgrade – Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering have developed national methodology for monitoring RSPIs. This methodology is harmonized with several key EU projects, such as SAFETYNET and DACOTA, that means that data are comparable at international level. From autumn 2013 till nowadays, according to developed national methodology for RSPIs monitoring, every year, twice a year Republic of Serbia collecting data regard key RSPIs. Results are usually published at different national and international conferences, through different reports, fact sheets, as well at official web site of Road Traffic Safety Agency. In this paper we presenting methodology for monitoring key RSPIs in the Republic of Serbia, as well some of the key results – current situation and trends. According to that results of monitoring RSPIs data in the Republic of Serbia, several key policy documents were adopted, i.e. National Road Safety Strategy for the Republic of Serbia for the period 2016-2020 includes data about current state, trends and intermediate and final targets for RSPIs. Also this data will be used for monitoring and assessing of success (reaching targets) of national road safety strategy and effects of applied road safety measures. In the meantime, many Serbian municipalities have started to use RSPIs data for their local road safety strategies and to plan their road safety activities, to allocate funds, etc.

Finally, to quality monitoring of RSIs it is a necessary to carry out the following steps: prepare the appropriate Manual; conduct a series of seminars and training on the importance, possibilities and the way of RSIs monitoring; begin the process of RSI s monitoring and monitor process in order to ensure the relevance of the collected data.

Marco Bassani, Leonardo Rossetti and Lorenzo Catani-Spatial Analysis of Road Crashes involving Vulnerable Road Users to Support of Road Safety Management Strategies / The strategy of 30 km/h zones, referred to in the international context as “traffic calming” measures, serves to safeguard vulnerable road users (VRU). Its main function, of course, is to compel drivers to observe a maximum speed limit of 30 km/h. However, urban infrastructure transformations modify the traffic collision pattern with a spatial temporal redistribution of events.
This work seeks to study the effects on collision distribution resulting from the implementation of a 30 km/h zone in the Mirafiori Nord area in the city of Turin in late 2008. The collision frequencies were evaluated over the period 2006-2016 and were based on data provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Both road traffic collisions involving VRU and vehicular users (noVRU) were taken into account.
Decreases in collision frequency were found for noVRU related accidents, while the VRU accident frequency remained essentially unchanged with only minor fluctuations consistent with the regression to the mean phenomenon. The countermeasures, which sought to protect VRU, were however very effective for noVRU. As the effects of each structural modification spill over into neighboring areas, the analysis of collision frequency was carried out by considering a study area greater than the one in which the 30 km/h zone was realized. In fact, due to the migration of events, the reduction in the collision frequency in the speed restricted zone was accompanied by its increase in the immediate surrounding area.

Dimitri Macorig, Cristiano Ristori and Valentino Bertoli-Development of a method to evaluate the priorities of intervention on the road network of the province of Pisa / In 2008 the Province of Pisa set up the Center for Road Safety Monitoring and in 2011 implemented a Road Cadastral Registry (R.D. acronym) for 1200 km of network under management; however, the increasing gap between maintenance needs (of a road network that is quickly and widely reaching the end of its useful life) and maintenance operations (due to the increasingly limited resources available, both human and financial) requires advanced and innovative tools in order to plan an efficient maintenance program.
Identify the vulnerabilities affecting roads infrastructures is not sufficient; it is essential to attribute a risk level and consequently to plan a priority order of maintenance interventions.
According to this strategy and using R.D. database (with traffic, accidents and geometric data), a methodology to rank priorities of intervention on restraining devices has been developed. Considering the results, the Head Office has extended this methodology to all the constituent components of R.C.
Proper checklists have been developed and are available to operators in the field using a simple App on tablet; once a checklist has been filled out, the operator sends information to the person in charge, who can immediately decide if the case can be solved with in-house management or needs to be part of a wider and long-term plan of intervention. With the software developed from Italia, the Province of Pisa, gained a short time an analysis of all Barriers on it’s network: good condition just 1%, modest damage 6%, relevant damage 36%, high damage 37% and alarming damage 20%.
In this latter case, data is analyzed in the system, through further algorithms, which combine the vulnerability detected with other parameters such as accidents, traffic, etc. It’s possible to know the overall risk level and the priority order of intervention.
The point of strength of this innovative project is the development of a network system capable to provide quick, comprehensive and low cost information on a vast road infrastructure, that enable to plan a rational and objective plan of maintenance interventions.

Eleonora Meta, Luca Persia, Davide Shingo Usami and Aliaksandra Zhukava- Road Safety Capacity Building in Belarus through the development of Road Safety Master Courses / The risk of traffic fatalities varies significantly across high, medium and low-income countries. Among the reasons for this in the latter ones, there is often a lack of road safety knowledge and political will.
Road safety is a multidisciplinary topic and requires trained professionals able to identify and implement efficient measures in the areas of engineering, enforcement, education and emergency services, taking into consideration social and economic aspects as well.
However, in some Eastern Europe Countries there are potential barriers to train adequately professionals, generally due to a lack of specialised training and training standardization. Such an example can be seen in Belarus where, although road safety is a key issue, it is not managed on an evidence-based approach and there seems to be insufficient funding for related research. An initiative towards increasing knowledge capacity is the Be-Safe project (EC Tempus), a joint effort between three EU Universities and four Belarusian Universities.
The objective of this paper is to describe the methodology carried out in Be-Safe to develop and test two 1st level Road Safety Master Courses (60 ECTS) in Belarus according to the Bologna process requirements. Initially, a User Needs Analysis was carried out to understand local conditions and needs in terms of teaching and research on road safety. The analysis highlighted a lack of research due to insufficient funding, linguistic barriers and inadequate international relationships. This isolation led to a need of updating contents and methods of courses for students as well as research topics. Then, expected learning outcomes and Masters’ curricula, one for the Technical Universities and one for the Economics Universities, were defined and developed respectively. Finally, Masters’ courses in four Belarusian Universities were tested.
Quality results were ensured through a Quality Board and assessment tools to monitor the Masters process as a whole. Contribution to create new courses and now everyone can apply this type of course and in mead time Belarus enter in Bologna system and trey try to include a Belarus university.

Davide Shingo Usami, Luca Persia, Roberto Gigli and Anastasia Azarko-Accident data analysis and on-field inspections: do they lead to similar conclusions? / Network Safety Ranking and Road Assessment Programme are two procedures used in road infrastructure safety management to rank the road sections of a network according to estimated road safety performance. The former uses indicators based on road accidents and their consequences while the latter method is based primarily on inspections of the road infrastructure.
The aim of this study was to verify whether there is a relationship between the indicators used within these methods, in order to evaluate if and under which conditions the two assessment approaches lead to similar results.
The adopted approach is based on the calibration and analysis of a wide array of models in order to reproduce the observed events – accidents, fatalities and injuries – with reference to different aggregations of the original data and in the two reference situations: with and without EuroRAP indicators.
The results obtained by the analysis are very interesting: out of 96 pairs of models tested 45 models pass the LRTest (i.e. almost 47% of the total), with a significance value of the test of less than 0.05. As expected, the negative binomial models certainly have a greater explanatory power. From the obtained results, the introduction of the EuroRAP variables ends up making the models that explain the frequency of accidents more convincing from a statistical point of view. However, there are no available Euro_RAP indicators specific to certain types of accidents that frequently occur on the motorway network, such as rear-end collisions. Probably, the inclusion of these accidents type, the explanatory power of the EuroRAP variables increases, at least on motorways. Conclusion and results point that RPS does not reflect accidents with incorrect driver’s behavior, evaluates the ability of the infrastructure to mitigate the severity of injuries, takes into account only specific crash types. To conclude the suggestion is to include other categories of accidents (rear-end collisions).

Boris Antic, Mirjana Grdinic, Dalibor Pesic and Vladimir Pajkovic– Benchmarking of the Road Safety Performance among the Regions by using DEA / Road traffic accidents have become a major public health concern in both developed and developing countries. Therefore, Road Safety Management has important Role in reducing the Number of Traffic Accident Casualties, but also to reduce other negative Consequences of Traffic. First step in Road Safety Management is to define current state of the Road Traffic Safety Level and this is often an Issue for Decision makers. Furthermore, evaluation and comparison of the Road Traffic Safety Level presents a major Challenge in Traffic Safety Researches. This is especially important when there is a need for comparison between different regions, according to performance in Road Safety, in order to better understand local safety situation, to set particular targets and formulate actions. Second important Issue is choosing an adequate method which will make comparison fair to all compared units (departments, municipalities, regions and countries). Road Traffic Safety is a complex system where more and more indicators are constantly being developed to describe it and it is often hard to find appropriate method. A lot of studies are focused on methods for the calculation of the level of traffic safety which uses a single numerical value for the assessment of the level of traffic safety. In other words, by using appropriate techniques, traffic safety indicators are combined into a single numerical value, in order to represent a grade of the Road Traffic Safety Level. The purpose of this study was to estimate performance i.e. the relative efficiency of different regions by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Particular method is tested in Montenegro on 21 municipalities and compared with similar Research from Serbia where 27 police departments were involved.

In Serbia was cca 7,000,000 citizens and in Montenegro cca 625,000 citizens. From 2016 to 2019 there are less number of killed in traffic and in Montenegro there are one part of territory without accidents.

CHAIRMAN: Tiziana Campisi