Methods of strategic road safety management: a systematic review

A well-developed road network plays a crucial role in fostering social and economic progress within a region. However, road crashes resulting in massive injuries and deaths profoundly affect socioeconomic development. There is a need therefore to identify working approaches used in road safety strategic management which provide evidence and a foundation to achieve safer road transport. This may be achieved through a systematic literature review considering both state-of-the-art technologies and best practice. Such a review is presented in this paper. The review involved searching twenty-six bibliographic databases and twenty-four websites of road-related organizations. Following the EPPI-Reviewer methodology, the researchers identified 30 studies that demonstrated various methods employed in the strategy development process. The review highlighted the prevalence of information technology in crash data analysis, particularly concerning big data applications. Moreover, existing resource allocation methods primarily focus on local countermeasures prioritization and ranking based on benefit cost analysis. However, the review identified a gap in comprehensive crash database understanding, and only a few single-objective optimization methods have been developed for strategy development, while there is a need for data mining methods and multi-objective optimisation methods supported by expert knowledge.