Safety trends in EU Member States: is there a learning pattern across nations?

Safety trends in EU Member States: is there a learning pattern across nations?

Borsos, Attila (TU Delft Civil Engineering and Geosciences)

Hagenzieker, M.P. (mentor)
Farah, H. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

2019

It is generally accepted that the road safety trend of a country is influenced by many factors related to the infrastructure, vehicles, health care etc. Nevertheless, road safety improvement is also a result of a learning process, which can come at an individual and a societal level, according to the current available literature. The former is due to the relationship between exposure (number of events an individual experiences) and risk of road accidents, and the latter is due to the learning process in the society.
The authors argue that the long-term improvement in safety does not only happen through individual and societal (i.e., within society) learning, but also through a third dimension which is the learning process across nations (i.e., in between societies). In this paper we attempt to capture this phenomenon in two ways using data for the EU Member States.
We first analyze countries’ progress in safety improvement in relation to their motorization level. Then we use panel regression to investigate whether the Human Development Index (HDI) as a measure of knowledge is a better predictor of safety instead of exposure measures (like car ownership level). The results show that for many countries lagging behind both in motorization and safety it took less time to converge in terms of safety than in motorization level. We also found that the HDI is overall a better predictor. While a few countries are already getting close to the saturation point in their motorization, an alternative knowledge-based predictor is needed for these countries to better describe trends in mortality rate.

road safety trends
learning pattern
knowledge transfer
motorization
EU

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d494c932-fc39-4c16-8d3b-883942e6cac4

2021-03-06

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© 2019 Attila Borsos