Evaluation and monitoring

The need for monitoring and evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation consists of the systematic study of the effects of various separate programme elements of the road safety plan at national, regional and local levels. Systematic and transparent quantified monitoring of the implementation of road safety strategy and progress towards meeting Government targets is essential both for maintaining the motivation of stakeholders (and hence the effectiveness of implementation) and for updating of the strategy and targets in light of experience. Monitoring and updating are integral parts of implementation and require appropriate collection, processing and publication of reliable data for:

• Continuous monitoring of targeted and other safety performance indicators
• Establishing the effectiveness of specific road safety measures by carrying out before
• and after studies.
• Reviewing and updating of policies and measures with re-distribution of resource
• towards more cost-effective measures
• Identifying delays in implementation requiring corrective action
• Establishing the level of public support for interventions

Safety performance indicators:

The data requirements and the level and type of disaggregation are closely linked to the detail of the road safety plan. They include:

• Crash or casualty indicators e.g. collision and casualty data from police, hospital and insurance records
• Behavioural indicators e.g. survey data on changes in speed or seat belt use
• Process and system indicators e.g. data on the number of hazardous locations treated or the number of junctions improved for safety

Evaluation methodologies

Evaluations of the effectiveness of countermeasures are essential to focus further development and prioritise further actions. National or EU level accident data can be used to describe overall trends but in-depth data is normally the most effective in assessing detailed engineering changes whether vehicle, infrastructure or road user behaviour based.

Public acceptance surveys

Covering representative samples of road user opinion are helpful in establishing levels of understanding and support for different interventions. These can often be used to place the contributions of narrowly focused lobbies into an appropriate context [61, 44]