How is road safety data collected across cities in Europe?

There is no single standard method to urban road accident data collection. This qualitative research aims to understand:

• Which data is collected in your city (fatalities, serious injuries, also lighter injuries or no injuries?), and to which level of detail?
• Which are the data sources in your city, incl. cooperation with police, hospitals and/or insurance companies?
• How is road safety data used for policy making in your city?

Background:

Considerable progress has been made concerning the benchmarking of road safety at national level. This includes European and international databases on road fatalities and injury data. On the urban level, efforts to reach the same level of scale and depth have yet to come. A major initiative is the International Transport Forum's "Safer City Streets" project, which builds a global urban road safety database. Polis and Safer City Streets are collaborating.

Scope:

The research will help all Polis members to get an overview how cities cooperate with police, hospitals, insurance companies to collect accident data, how they feel about the data completeness and quality and how accident data is used for policy making. We are investigating which cities work with performance indicators. The research project focuses on the methodology of data collection. It does not build a new accident database, nor does it analyse or benchmark raw accident data.

Outcomes:

The research findings will shed light on the comparability of accident data across cities. It can also help identify innovative approaches worth presenting in more details in upcoming Working Group meetings and road safety initiatives. This knowledge will be available to all Polis members and allows to develop Polis road safety activities and cooperation with the ITF in the most useful direction for Polis members.

Interested to participate?

Cities interested to contribute are asked to send an email to Dagmar Köhler at dkoehler@polisnetwork.eu. We will email you the survey and schedule interviews for March and April.