Strategic Indicators for Targeted Road Safety Index

Abstract

Road safety has become one of the most hazardous threats to human kinds since 1.25 million road traffic deaths occur every year, with young people between the age of 15-29 mostly died from road traffic death. As this figure continues to increase steadily each passing year, concerns on developing strategic road safety planning have been taken into the picture. Governments, including Malaysia, refer to outputs from road safety indexes to assess their performance and improve local conditions. Several road safety indexes have included Malaysia in their list, which is stratified according to income status, continents, and the number of populations, to name a few. However, the competitions were seen to be unfairly played as each and every country are unique and different from each other thus ideal comparisons are very challenging. This paper aims to shed light on this issue by suggesting suitable and strategic indicators to be used in a targeted road safety index to allow a fair comparison between countries. Any related articles available on the internet were scoured so that the fundamentals of a targeted road safety index could be developed. The results show that the development of a road safety index requires careful and distinctive works as the road safety index was meant to compare countries and work as planning and monitoring tools. Also, other road safety indexes are showing different outputs between countries. To overcome this, new and targeted road safety indicators were proposed according to each pillar in the United Nations Decade of Action 2015- 2020. Developing the proposed road safety index can provide an alternative road safety index and a tool to encourage and motivate countries to improve their local road safety conditions.