How do citizens perceive road safety and mobility? The role of opinion surveys and examples from the ROSEE project

Abstract

Urban and territorial planning should strive to increase the quality of citizens’ lives. Therefore, planners cannot avoid to think in terms of sustainability, trying to provide high levels of quality of life not only to the current, but to the future generations alike. Road safety is a fundamental requirement of a sustainable city, but road accidents still represent a significant public health and economic problem. Within this framework, this paper will focus on the importance of human perception while dealing with urban planning, and in particular, with mobility and road safety. Indeed, collecting road accident data is not enough to completely understand the risk dynamics that take place every day on our roads: listening to the road users and to their opinions may be helpful to better assess road safety related threats, and to therefore plan safer and more sustainable cities. The aim of the proposed paper is to demonstrate that, in order to properly plan interventions in the field of road safety, road accident data must be highly integrated with road users’ opinions that can be investigated through opinion surveys. This paper will present the methodologies and the results of opinion surveys that were conducted in the north of Italy during the period 2011–2013, to investigate the behaviour and perceptions of different road users, with different levels of vulnerability.