Marrakech declaration: Road safety needs better data

The ”Marrakech Declaration on Better Safety Data for Better Safety Outcomes” was adopted on the final day of the conference by international road safety experts from more than 40 countries. It makes a number of recommendations aimed at policy makers and other leaders with responsibility for road safety. These include:

• Clearly identify which data are needed for making decisions in road safety.
• Address underreporting of road crashes and casualties.
• Use more data on injury crashes - fatality data are insufficient to fully understand road safety problems. A common definition for injuries will allow comparisons.
• Better knowledge of road safety also relies on better safety performance indicators, exposure data and context information.
• Let a national agency analyse and publish road safety data collected at state and national levels.
• Monitor the main risk factors. Make results publicly available and use them to adapt road safety strategies.
• Harmonise road safety data based on common definitions. Develop common methodologies to enable meaningful comparisons.
• Share road safety data among countries and co-operate within international initiatives. Benchmarking between countries, regions and cities, has proven effective, for instance through the regional road safety observatory in Latin America.

IRTAD Road Safety Annual Report 2017 released

“Good road safety data is fundamental to achieving the road safety objectives set by ambitious countries and contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals”, said Young Tae Kim, Secretary-General of the International Transport Forum (ITF). He also presented the organisation’s Road Safety Annual Report 2017 with latest road safety data for 40 countries that has just been released.

The full reports

• Marrakech Declaration: https://www.itf-oecd.org/road-safety-data-marrakech-declaration
• IRTAD Road Safety Annual Report 2017: https://www.itf-oecd.org/road-safety-annual-report-2017

Road safety data for cities

The ITF's "Safer City Streets" initiative collects road safety data from cities around the world. Polis and Safer City Streets have set up a cooperation to exchange knowledge on road safety data (press release available here). The first joint workshop was held in April 2017 in Paris. The next workshop takes place on 7 and 8 December in Brussels, back to back to the 2017 Polis Conference.

For more information please contact Dagmar Köhler at dkoehler@polisnetwork.eu

More information on the cooperation can be found here.