IRTAD Conference: Road safety needs better data

With the United Nations aiming to halve the 1.3 million yearly deaths around the world caused by road crashes, international road safety experts met at the IRTAD conference, Morocco, and have adopted Marrakech Declaration: better safety data for better outcomes. The experts from more than 40 countries concluded from the declaration that improving road safety data is essential to reducing road deaths and injuries.
October 18, 2017 Read time: 2 mins

With the United Nations aiming to halve the 1.3 million yearly deaths around the world caused by road crashes, international road safety experts met at the IRTAD conference, Morocco, and have adopted Marrakech Declaration: better safety data for better outcomes. 

The experts from more than 40 countries concluded from the declaration that improving road safety data is essential to reducing road deaths and injuries. They have made a series of recommendations aimed at policymakers and other leaders who are responsible for road safety.

These include identifying which data is needed for making decisions in road safety; addressing underreporting of road crashes and casualties; using more data on injury crashes (fatality data are insufficient to understand road safety problems fully). Furthermore, better knowledge of road safety also relies on better safety performance indicators, exposure data and context information; allowing a national agency analyse and publish road safety data collected at state and national levels. In addition, the recommendations also put forward monitoring risk factors and making results publicly available; harmonising road safety data based on common definitions, and finally, sharing road safety data among countries and co-operating within international initiates.

Fred Wegman, chair or the IRTAD Group, said Reliable data are essential to understand, assess and monitor the nature and magnitude of the road safety problem and the related solutions”.

He added, “Improvements made to the quality of road safety data will also improve the quality of data driven policy decisions.”

Classification & Data Collection Urban Traffic Control

Related Content

  • The red light camera choice: 60 killed or save US$231 million a year
    June 5, 2015
    David Crawford investigates new cost-benefit analysis of red light cameras. US states can now realistically calculate the economic benefits of using red light safety cameras, alone or in combination with other measures, to cut road traffic accident levels. The results could be of material value in making the case for the cameras as a number of state legislatures continue to debate their acceptability.
    Read More
  • Study finds big differences in toll collection cases
    December 16, 2013
    Examination of Norway’s tolling companies finds much to praise, and some criticisms too, as Torill Eidsheim told delegates at the ASECAP conference. The cost of collecting tolls has a substantial effect on the profitability, or otherwise, of tolling companies and is within the company’s control to a far greater degree than, for instance, traffic volumes. And while it is easy to assume that all tolling companies incur similar collection costs, that is not always the case according to Torill Eidsheim, pres
    Read More
  • ACE report: private sector and user-pay for English roads
    May 16, 2018
    It’s one minute to midnight for funding England’s roads, according to a timely new report - and the clock’s big hand is pointing to some form of user-pay solution, reports David Arminas. Is there any way out of future user-pay funding for England’s highway infrastructure? The answer is a resounding ‘no’, according to the recently-published report Funding Roads for the Future. The 25-page document by the London-based Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) calls for a radical rethink about how to
    Read More
  • UK transport planning not giving sufficient priority to air quality, say researchers
    August 31, 2016
    According to two university researchers, UK transport planning is not sufficiently taking into account the environmental impacts of transport choices. Their report, which is due to be presented at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference today, says that road transport is the principal cause of air pollution in over 95 per cent of legally designated “Air Quality Management Areas” in the UK. Current estimates are that over 50,000 deaths a year can be attributed to air polluti
    Read More

Highlighted Content