Classification of Recent Approaches in Road Safety Research

Large number of road crashes and casualties in Iran indicates that the numerous road safety researches undertaken so far have not been effectively applicable. To achieve creditable progress in road safety in practice, a broad revision in orientation towards research on road safety is required. Traffic safety is a multidisciplinary subject and research field on road safety consists of a wide range of contexts. Therefore, road safety researcher should have a decent thinking order in the early stages of the project when research scope and limitations are proposed. This study aims to classify recent approaches used in research works reported in international peer-reviewed journals. Exploring the literature, the authors have classified the recent research works on road safety into four categories, namely crash data analysis, non-crash data analysis, road safety evaluation and road safety surveillance. The fourfold intellectual model presented in this paper readily enables the researchers to appraise their orientation properly towards the road safety problem they are dealing with, in order to find appropriate potential justifications. The model can also offer an examination tool to measure the level of correspondence between the problem and the proposed methodology by the researcher. Finally, the model provides the researchers with appropriate means to find the study scopes and limits.