Road Safety Performance Evaluation in Iran and Developing Countries using Outranking Methods

Comparing and evaluating the road safety performance is desirable in trans-national levels, because each country can achieve a better and deeper understanding of its road safety status. In this study, a subset of multi-criteria decision-making methods, called the outranking methods, including PROMETHEE and ELECTRE methods was used to evaluate the road safety performance. In these methods, the Analytical Hierarchy Process method is used to obtain the weights of the indicators, which are used as input weights in the PROMETHEE and ELECTRE models. The methods were used for Iran and a set of developing countries in order to examine the situation in Iran compared to the others. Then, the results being compared with the number of road fatalities per hundred thousand people for these countries as the reference point. According to the results it was found that, among the five road safety pillars, the pillar of road safety management is the most important and the pillar of post-crash response is the least important one. Also, the lead agency sub-pillar is the highest importance in the road safety management pillar and the child restraint sub-pillar is the least importance in the safer road users pillar from expert's point of view. Among the 15 countries studied in this study, Poland found the highest rank and is known as the best-performing country. In between, Iran ranked 13th, reflecting Iran's relatively poor performance against other countries.