Abstract
‘Traffic Safety 2025’ is a consortium project that has been going on in Finland since year 2008 with the aim to support decision making for national traffic safety goals. The consortium project involves currently five member organisations, authorities and private companies. Every year 6–8 research projects are realized as part of this consortium project that involves multidisciplinary traffic safety research in the areas of road, rail, and maritime traffic. The objective of this presentation is to shortly introduce the ‘Traffic safety 2025’ project and two research project which were conducted in recent years within ‘Traffic safety 2025’.
The first project concerned serious injuries in road traffic, that have been recorded in Finland since 2014 using AIS3+-criteria. In 2014–2015 less than half of all serious injuries were included in the official statistics in Finland, creating a significant bias. The results of the analysis of serious injuries showed that taking into account not only fatalities but also serious injuries highlight the safety problems on streets and low-category rural roads, including moped accidents, single-vehicle accidents and the safety concerns of aged pedestrians and bicyclists. The review emphasized several factors that should be considered when developing traffic safety work, such as the nature of safety problems on different roads and among different road user groups and people involved. This study highlighted the need to collect and document high quality data on serious injuries and the exploitation of this data in road safety analysis. It is recommended that the authorities should review regularly the number of seriously injured people both within and outside the official statistics and further develop their reporting methods for serious injuries.
The second study aimed to examine the safety effects of middle barriers on Finnish non-motorway highways. The development of safety on roads with recently built middle barriers was followed up using a before-after approach. The second objective was to study the safety characteristics of these middle barrier roads by comparing the current safety situation with that on corresponding highways and applying accident modelling. Both the before-after study and analysis of the current safety situation revealed that the effect of middle barriers in reducing fatal accidents and fatalities is remarkable. Middle barriers could prevent around four out of five fatalities. In fact, the risk per vehicle mileage of fatal accidents and fatalities on middle-barrier roads was slightly lower than on motorways. Based on the results, the authors recommend that middle barriers be built widely on highways prone to head-on accidents.
The first project concerned serious injuries in road traffic, that have been recorded in Finland since 2014 using AIS3+-criteria. In 2014–2015 less than half of all serious injuries were included in the official statistics in Finland, creating a significant bias. The results of the analysis of serious injuries showed that taking into account not only fatalities but also serious injuries highlight the safety problems on streets and low-category rural roads, including moped accidents, single-vehicle accidents and the safety concerns of aged pedestrians and bicyclists. The review emphasized several factors that should be considered when developing traffic safety work, such as the nature of safety problems on different roads and among different road user groups and people involved. This study highlighted the need to collect and document high quality data on serious injuries and the exploitation of this data in road safety analysis. It is recommended that the authorities should review regularly the number of seriously injured people both within and outside the official statistics and further develop their reporting methods for serious injuries.
The second study aimed to examine the safety effects of middle barriers on Finnish non-motorway highways. The development of safety on roads with recently built middle barriers was followed up using a before-after approach. The second objective was to study the safety characteristics of these middle barrier roads by comparing the current safety situation with that on corresponding highways and applying accident modelling. Both the before-after study and analysis of the current safety situation revealed that the effect of middle barriers in reducing fatal accidents and fatalities is remarkable. Middle barriers could prevent around four out of five fatalities. In fact, the risk per vehicle mileage of fatal accidents and fatalities on middle-barrier roads was slightly lower than on motorways. Based on the results, the authors recommend that middle barriers be built widely on highways prone to head-on accidents.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 5 Dec 2019 |
| MoE publication type | Not Eligible |
| Event | Vision Zero for Sustainable Road Safety in the Baltic Sea Region - Tallinn, Estonia Duration: 4 Dec 2019 → 5 Dec 2019 https://www.ttu.ee/conference/vision-zero-2019/ |
Conference
| Conference | Vision Zero for Sustainable Road Safety in the Baltic Sea Region |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Estonia |
| City | Tallinn |
| Period | 4/12/19 → 5/12/19 |
| Internet address |
Keywords
- road safety