The analysis of major works on the social change highlights that the problem of the road safety must be tackled as a complex phenomenon which requires multiple strategies of influence, each one of them pursuing goals and addressing themselves to specific targets. This supposes to work out a public policy integrating various dimensions of this social problem in a balanced way in order to durably change the behavior of all its stakeholders vis-a-vis the road risks. The case study of the policy of road safety evolution in France highlights that the public action on the matter raises more than one institutional “arrangement” that of a conceived strategic approach in a systemic way. Focused from the start on the regulation of the road-users behavior, the policy of French road safety pains to treat in a balanced way all the variables of the problem by proposing an integrated and ambitious strategy for reducing road risk.
The objective of this research is to study the relationship between social disparities and levels of road safety. This disparity is viewed through its geographical dimension, i.e. belonging to a particular space. The research covered the territory of the Lille Urban Community (LMCU). The choice of neighbourhoods was made by selecting 5 sensitive urban areas. These study fields have different characteristics: size, city centre/periphery, old housing/housing estates, etc. These areas are compared with contiguous control areas whose populations have more privileged socioeconomic characteristics. A geographical analysis system was developed in a partnership with LMCU services to spatialize data from national and local censuses. Access to police reports from the Nord department makes it possible to analyse the accidents. Those involving the inhabitants of the study areas were selected and then spatialized and encoded. The comparison established between the sensitive urban areas and the control areas enables us to conclude that there is an adjusted relative risk of 1.363. The analyses are expanded by comparing the methods of transportation involved, the socioeconomic characteristics of the inhabitants and their professions.
Significant programs of speed enforcement have been in operation in a number of State and international jurisdictions for some time and many have been the subject of rigorous evaluation. Such programs aim to reduce crash frequency and/or injury severity through reductions in mean speed and/or changes to the speed distribution. In broad terms, the speed enforcement programs evaluated have been demonstrated to be beneficial in reducing road trauma. However, it is only in examining the individual characteristics of such programs that the mechanisms of effect become evident and information useful for the development of new speed enforcement programs can be obtained. This paper describes the speed enforcement program evaluations and the information concerning the relationship between enforcement intensity and program outcomes that they contain. Such analysis was conducted for all major speed enforcement modes, including mobile and fixed speed cameras operated overtly or covertly (including point-to-point average speed cameras), moving mode radar and hand-held laser speed detectors. An economic analysis of program outcomes was also conducted for each of these modes. This analysis was used to inform the development of a new speed enforcement strategy for Western Australia (WA) that can be expected to reduce road fatalities by 25 percent in a cost efficient way.
Intelligent Cars can make road transport safer, cleaner and more efficient. This paper provides -based on research done in the eIMPACT project (FP 6, European Commission)- a methodology for assessing the socio-economic impacts of Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems (IVSS). The assessment frame¬work addresses in a comprehensive way the society perspective and stake¬holder perspectives on IVSS. In its core the framework relies on cost-benefit analysis (CBA). The methodology is however enlarged by stakeholder analyses. In the results section, benefit-cost ratios are presented and discussed for all twelve systems which were analysed in eIMPACT. The benefit-cost results are also tested on sensitivity of results. Overall, it can be concluded that the analysed systems are profitable from the society point of view. The results are mainly driven by the safety benefits. In a temporal perspective, a wider uptake of systems is going to happen in the next decade which helps to realise the benefits. The stakeholder analyses can provide deeper insight in the societal groups who bear the costs and who benefit from the system use. As an illustrative example, results for the break-even analyses of users are depicted and discussed.
Around one million people are killed world wide every year in road-traffic accidents. The risks and consequences of accidents increase progressively with speed, which ultimately is determined by the individual driver. The behaviour of the motorist thus affects both her own and other peoples’ safety. Internalisation of external costs of road transport has hitherto been focused on distance-based taxes or insurance premiums. While these means may affect driven distance, they have no influence on driving behaviour. This paper argues that by linking on-board positioning systems to insurance premiums it is possible to reward careful driving and get drivers to self select into different risk categories depending on their compliance to speed limits. We report two economic field experiments that have tested ways to induce car-owners to have technical platforms installed in their vehicle in order to affect the extent of speeding. It is demonstrated that a bonus to remunerate those that have the device installed, tantamount to a lower insurance premium, increases drivers’ propensity to accept the technical devices. In a second experiment the size of the bonus is made dependent on the actual frequency of speeding. We find that this is a second way to discipline users to drive at legal speeds.
Response rates for household travel surveys are tending to fall, and it seems unlikely that this trend will be reversed in the future. In recent years, travel data collection methods have evolved in order to obtain reliable data that are sufficiently detailed to feed increasingly complex models, and in order to integrate new technologies into survey protocols (Internet, GPS...). Combining different media is an obvious low-cost way of improving data quality as it increases the overall response rate. But the question of the comparability of data over time and between different survey modes remains unresolved. This paper makes a comparative analysis between the travel behaviours of web-based survey respondents and respondents to a face-to-face interview. The data were obtained from the 2006 Lyon conurbation household travel survey. Our analysis shows that the Internet respondents travelled less than the face-to-face respondents (3.0 versus 3.63 daily trips), and that the differences between the two groups varied according to the travel mode and trip purpose. While part of this difference can be explained by socio-economic disparities (the Internet respondents had a specific profile) we cannot exclude the possibility of under-reporting due to the web medium.