Prioritising the Road Safety Programme

Abstract

All over the world, a large number of road accidents are occurring every year causing loss of life, injuries and loss of property. In a research study done in Sri Lanka, these losses had been quantified and it was shown that the total cost of traffic accidents in Sri Lanka is about 1% of the GDP of the country. Therefore, there is an urgent need to have a properly designed road safety programme to bring down the accident costs and save the lives. As the budget available for the road safety would be limited, especially in developing countries, it is vital to priorities the road safety improvements. There are two such mechanisms identified in this research termed as Equivalent Accident Number (EAN) and the Weighted Accident Number (WAN). It is shown that the EAN is a better mechanism to rank an accident blackspots and the WAN, which is based on the collision type analysis, could be used to plan the road safety programme properly.