More Efficiency in Road Safety Work

23 Sept 2016
DEKRA and 16 other partners are involved in the EU project “SafetyCube”, in which a wide variety of road safety measures are compared systematically on a Europe-wide basis for the first time, including with regard to cost and benefit.
The EU continues to pursue the ambitious strategic objective of reducing the number of road deaths on Europe’s roads by half compared to 2010 by 2020. This objective appears more ambitious than ever. In 2015, more people died in road accidents in the EU than in the previous year for the first time since 2001 (2015: 26,000; 2014: 25,900). In the preceding years, the number of road deaths was already declining too slowly measured against the objective. Therefore, it is all the more necessary for all EU member states to intensify their road safety measures. These necessary measures include improving infrastructure and vehicle safety, focusing more heavily on creating awareness and training, and ensuring the implementation of the traffic regulations.
The EU has already launched numerous projects and initiatives for this purpose. One of these is the research project “SafetyCube”, which is funded as part of “Horizon 2020” (“Mobility for Growth”) and which will continue to run until 2018 in a consortium of 17 European partners. In addition to DEKRA, these partners include the Transport Safety Research Centre of Loughborough University (Great Britain), the Belgian Road Safety Institute, the SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research (Netherlands), the Kuratorium für Verkehrssicherheit (Austria), the Institute of Transport Economics (Norway), the SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre (Sweden), the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks, the Centre for Transport and Logistics of the University of Rome (Italy), and the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover.
The aim of “SafetyCube” is to promote the selection and implementation of strategies and measures in the areas of people, infrastructure, and vehicle safety in a targeted manner so as to reduce the number of accidents in Europe and worldwide. The project includes comprehensive analysis of accident risks and will provide guidelines for registering and following up on serious road accidents. Moreover, the analyses are to be used to assess road safety measures with respect to their contribution to safety, calculate the socioeconomic consequential costs of accidents with severely injured parties, and perform cost-benefit analyses.
As a central result, a tool (Decision Support System) will be produced that is to support decision makers in selecting the most efficient measures for the most urgent road safety problems. Here, particular focus is on vulnerable road users – i.e. pedestrians, cyclists, senior citizens, children, and persons with reduced mobility. And not without reason. This group continues to make up more than 50 percent of those who die in road accidents EU-wide.