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

  • Rekor: solving the data puzzle
    April 19, 2022
    AI can help transport agencies to deal with incidents on the road. Noam Maital of Rekor explains to Adam Hill how marrying up different types of data can be like putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle
    Read More
  • NTSB calls for immediate action on collision avoidance systems for vehicles
    June 12, 2015
    A report by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) outlines the life-saving benefits of currently available collision avoidance systems and recommends that the technology become standard on all new passenger and commercial vehicles. The report, The Use of Forward Collision Avoidance Systems to Prevent and Mitigate Rear-End Crashes, stresses that collision avoidance systems can prevent or lessen the severity of rear-end crashes, thus saving lives and reducing injuries. According to statistics fro
    Read More
  • StreetLight Data maps future
    February 20, 2019
    Laura Schewel of StreetLight Data talks to Adam Hill about the importance of measuring what you do – and about how paint will remain perhaps the most important piece of technology in the city planners’ armoury for a decade to come Transportation is dangerous, responsible for 30% of global cargo emissions today. Some experts believe that it will be responsible for 80% by 2050. And that’s before you even get on to the safety question - just ask tech entrepreneur Laura Schewel. “Transportation is getting wo
    Read More
  • EU aims to turn ITS theory into practice
    May 18, 2016
    Gareth Horton explains how the European Commission’s Transport Research and Innovation Portal can help expedite research and turn theory into practice. Over the next few years Europe’s transport systems face a number of challenges, such as improving urban mobility while at the same time protecting population health and accommodating the accessibility needs of an ageing but active population.
    Read More

Highlighted Content