Uncertainty assessment of the road safety index

Composite indicators aggregate domain-specific information in one index, on the basis of which countries can be assigned a relative ranking. Recently, the road safety community got convinced of the policy supporting role of indicators in terms of benchmarking, target setting and selection of measures. However, combining the information of a set of relevant risk indicators in one index presenting the whole picture turns out to be very challenging. In particular, the rank of a country can be largely influenced by the methodological choices made during the composite indicator building process. Decisions concerning the selection of indicators, the normalisation of the indicator values, the weighting of indicators and the way of aggregating can influence the final ranking. In this research, it is shown that the road safety ranking of countries differs significantly according to the selected weighting method, the expert choice and the set of indicators. From these three input factors, the selection of the set of indicators is most influential. A well considered selection of indicators will therefore establish the largest reduction in ranking uncertainty. With a set of appropriate indicators, the proposed framework reveals the major sources of uncertainty in the creation of a composite road safety indicator. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.