Does empirical evidence support the effectiveness of the Safe System approach to road safety management?

Connected Intelligent Transportation System Model to Minimize Societal Cost of Travel in Urban Networks

“…Another suggestion for further research would be the calculation of the exponents of Elvik's model [10,24] for each study area from the very beginning. For this purpose, a large number and very detailed data on the conditions of the traffic accidents that take place in the study area would be needed.…”

“…The most common types of accident in the literature are (a) fatal accidents (fa), (b) serious injury accidents (sea), (c) slight injury accidents (sla) and (d) property-only damage accidents (pdo). Traffic accidents cost CAc is estimated as a function of mean velocity V [m/s] as follows [10,23,24].…”

“…The type of vehicle and its passengers' trip purpose are highly related. In Equation (10), for each vehicle type j (e.g., private car, bus, truck), T(V) is the travel time per traversed distance [s/m] as a function of velocity V [m/s]; p pur is the percentage of passengers that travel for purpose pur; W pur is the unit cost of travel time for purpose pur [EUR/s-person]; d is the total traversed distance per vehicle type j [m]; and x is the average vehicle occupancy of vehicle type j…”

“…Compared to other European countries, Greece ranks 20th of 27 in traffic safety [9]. Therefore, the factor of traffic accidents is critical in the estimation of the societal cost of travel and its minimisation leads to safer travel [10].…”

Maturity measurement in road traffic injury prevention

“…The economic costs of such losses have been estimated at up to 7% of Gross Domestic Product (Jacobs et al, 2000;Elvik, 2000;iRAP, 2021;Wijnen & Stipdonk, 2016;OECD, 2006) Research has confirmed that there is a correlation between the maturity of road safety initiatives and road safety collisions (Amador & Willis, 2014). Road safety in countries with a high level of Safe System implementation, such as Norway (Elvik & Naevestad, 2023), Sweden (Belin et al, 2012;Johansson, 2009), or the Netherlands (Wegman et al, 2006;Weijermars & Wegman, 2011), show how this approach helps to improve road safety effectively. This was shown in many research papers, with examples found in Wegman et al (2015), Edvardsson Björnberg et al (2020) and Bliss & Breen (2013).…”