Demonstrating a correlation between the maturity of road safety practices and road safety incidents.

Conclusion: Road safety practices associated with enforcement of speed limits and promotion of alternative modes are the most significant road safety practices toward which mature countries have concentrated their efforts, resulting in a lower frequency of fatalities, injury rates, and property damage accidents. The authors argue that the use of gross domestic product (GDP) as a predictor of road safety incidents suffers from the presumptive assumption that the only criterion that matters is national income, therefore erroneously predicting that richer countries all perform approximately the same in fatalities and that developing nations are at various stages, with high variability and uncertainty in prediction. It is proposed that an aggregation of individual maturity scores from road safety practices will lead to a better indicator for policy because it connects externalities (fatalities/injuries) with intrinsic factors for which policies can be oriented. PMID: 24867569 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Traffic Injury Prevention - Category: Occupational Health Authors: Tags: Traffic Inj Prev Source Type: research