Time-Series Models of Aggregate Road Risk and Their Applications to European Countries

This paper aims to describe how time-series analysis of road risk has been performed at the national level in Europe since Smeed's seminal study of 1949. The first part of the paper surveys European applications of time-series analysis to road safety since the beginning of the 1980s. A historical overview of the various approaches followed and the different types of model that have been used to analyse changes in road risk are given, referring to the foregoing historical account. The last part of the paper presents recent modelling conducted in the framework of the EU FP6 project "SafetyNet-Building the European Road Safety Observatory", which ran from 2004 to 2008, with the aim of gathering harmonized data bases from the member states and performing a comparative monitoring of trends. Recommendations for using dedicated models which handle time dependency when applied to road safety were given. Applications to a number of national datasets, including France, the Netherlands and Greece, have revealed different ways in which risk exposure can be included in the models in order to conduct a comparative analysis of trends. Research directions for extending these comparative analyses are given.