A Cross-Year Comparative Analysis of Road Safety Performance in European Countries

The construction of a composite road safety performance indicator (or index) is becoming increasingly popular in recent decades for ranking countries and identifying poor areas. However, most index development studies only concentrate on one year, which means that there is a lack of cross-year comparison. To monitor the progress in road safety over time, this paper focuses on the road safety performance changes in a set of European countries between 2008 and 2015. To this end, index scores for these European countries are computed by combining a number of safety performance indicators (SPIs). The same SPIs are selected and the same analysis method is applied using data from both 2008 and 2015. Comparison results show that road safety performance rankings of several countries change significantly over time. In addition, we obtained useful insight in the changes of intervention by deducing the weights allocated to each indicator in 2008 and 2015.