Moving Towards Safe and Sustainable Mobility: The Development of a RoaD AccidEnts InformAtion CenteR for Greece (DEAR)

Abstract

With the number of road traffic fatalities continuously increasing around the world and road crashes being the most common cause of death among young people, road safety constitutes an urgent, vast societal problem. In Europe, despite the significant improvements made on road safety levels, further steps must be taken to deliver safe and sustainable mobility. Given that “what gets measured gets also managed”, the systematic collection, processing and reporting of road accidents data is considered a valuable tool for interpreting casualty trends and improving road safety. In this context, this paper introduces a novel, comprehensive roaD accidEnts informAtion centeR (DEAR) for Greece. DEAR was developed in the framework of the “Intelligent Research Infrastructure for Shipping, Supply Chain, Transport, and Logistics” (ENIRISST) and aims to assist and provide valuable information to the Greek relevant stakeholders and the general public. DEAR provides information on the number and characteristics of road traffic accidents and associated casualties in four succeeding spatial levels (national, regional units, municipalities, and cities) through the measurement of multiple standardized indicators. DEAR uses as input a wide variety of officially available data as well as open-source data including road traffic accidents and socio-demographic data. DEAR utilizes SQL queries to deliver trends and comparative analyses, which are presented to the users via a combination of interactive tables, graphs, and maps. DEAR is expected to be an insightful tool for decision-making in policy decisions regarding road safety, as well as a useful information center for interested researchers.