Road safety development in Europe: a decade of changes (2001-2010)

To evaluate the road safety development of a country over time, the percentage change in the number of road fatalities is traditionally the main indicator. However, simply considering the reduction in the road fatalities may not correctly reflect the real improvement in road safety because the transport circumstances of a country underlying the road fatalities also change every year. In this study, we present a new way for measuring the road safety performance change over time, which is to use the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist productivity index. In doing so, we can not only focus on the evolution of road safety final outcomes within a given period, but also take the changes of different measures of exposure in the same period into account. In the application, the DEA-based Malmquist productivity index (DEA-MI) is used to measure the extent to which the EU countries have improved their road safety performance over the period 2001-2010. More objective and insightful results are obtained compared to the ones based on the traditional indicator. The results show considerable road safety progress in most of the Member States during these ten years, and the fatality risk rather than the fatality number on Europe's roads has actually been reduced by approximately half. However, the situation differed considerably from country to country. The decomposition of the DEA-MI into 'efficiency change' and 'technical change' further reveals that the bulk of the improvement during the last decade was attained through the adoption of productivity-enhancing new technologies throughout the road transport sector in Europe, rather than through the relatively underperforming countries catching up with those best-performing ones.