Road Safety Evaluation Methods

Road safety is usually identified by “no crash” and “no casualty” criteria and its importance is usually measured conversely. It is a complicated matter consisting of different components. A deep comprehension of road safety and recognizing its effective elements as well as assessing the impact of these elements on the safety of roads is absolutely necessary. This needs be performed to achieve optimal allocation of restricted road safety budget. Since measuring the safety of roads just on the basis of the crash or casualty rate has no advantages in recognizing and resolving the problem, researchers have proposed using performance indicators in road safety extent. To evaluate the safety of roads, a number of methods have been proposed. These could be divided into two major groups: socioeconomic road safety performance evaluation programs, consisting of MCA and Cost- Benefit Analysis (budget evaluation methods) and structural ones, consisting of statistical methods and data mining. Of these, methods simultaneously assessing the uttermost number of road safety indices, such as composite road safety performance evaluation, data mining, and DEA, are more appropriate, while other methods, such as Cost- Benefit analysis, could play a supplementary role. In this paper, by reviewing road safety evaluation methods, and using the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) as a way of reducing variables to evaluate massive crash data more correctly, the most appropriate methods have been proposed.