Background: Although public bodies need to know drivers’ perception of road safety, in Latin America there are no valid and reliable instruments that propose an integral dimensionality. The objective of this study was to design and validate a Road Safety Perception Questionnaire (RSPQ). Methodology: The design included a review of the available evidence and expert knowledge to select the dimensional items for the instrument. A pilot test was carried out to determine possible corrections and adjustments to the questionnaire, after which a Confirmatory Factor Analysis was performed on a stratified sample of 736 Ecuadorian drivers to determine its reliability and construct validity. Results: The results suggest that the RSPQ has a clear factorial structure with high factorial weight items and good internal consistency. The results of the 41-item model grouped into six dimensions (human, vehicle, road infrastructure, regulatory framework and intervention measures, socioeconomic and driving precautions) obtained the best adjustment indexes at the absolute, incremental and parsimonious levels. Conclusions: The preliminary RSPQ evidence can be considered a valid and reliable instrument to assess drivers’ perception of road safety.

This article proposes an energy-efficiency strategy based on the optimization of driving patterns for an electric vehicle (EV). The EV studied in this paper is a commercial vehicle only driven by a traction motor. The motor drives the front wheels indirectly through the differential drive. The electrical inverter model and the power-train efficiency are established by lookup tables determined by power tests in a dynamometric bank. The optimization problem is focused on maximizing energy-efficiency between the wheel power and battery pack, not only to maintain but also to improve its value by modifying the state of charge (SOC). The solution is found by means of a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The optimizer simulation results validate the increasing efficiency with the speed setpoint variations, and also show that the battery SOC is improved. The best results are obtained when the speed variation is between 5% and 6%.

Background: Road safety is a significant public health problem because it causes negative consequences on victims and families. The objective was to analyze the most significant changes in traffic crashes in Ecuador during the period from 2000 to 2019. With data obtained from the National Institute of Statistics and Census, we performed the analysis to identify: the number of traffic crashes, the number of victims, and other study variables. Methods: Descriptive and analytical statistics and the contrast of proportions were used to analyze data from 2000 to 2019. Results: According to the ideal joinpoint analysis model, there was a significant decrease in the number of recorded traffic accidents from 2015 to 2019 of −8.54 per year, while the tendency to die increased in females (2.05 per year) and males (3.29 per year). The most common crash was a collision, and the automobile appeared as the most involved vehicle from 2015 to 2019. The hypothesis test contrast is used to determine if statistically significant differences exist between age groups by gender of the driver injured in the period 2017–2018. Conclusions: This study determines the most significant changes in the variables related to traffic crashes, where mortality due to this cause in the last four years has had a growth rate of 1.8% compared to collisions that presented a rate of −31.12%. The contrast of the hypothesis test shows significant differences in the injury level between males and female drivers, depending on the age group.