An investigation into road safety performance in Chinese provincial-level administrative regions: Insights from the...

Road safety is a vital public concern aimed at preventing road-related injuries and fatalities. Assessing road safety status can be effectively conducted using performance measurement tools, which help identify areas for improvement and guide the development of targeted safety strategies.

This study evaluates the road safety performance of Chinese provinces from 2018 to 2020 using an undesirable data envelopment analysis model and the meta-frontier approach to measure input-output efficiency.

During the three-year period, two, three, and two provinces, respectively, achieved efficiency scores considered as benchmarks. Clustering analysis grouped the performance into three tiers, with Beijing and Shanghai consistently in the highest-performing tier. Provinces in eastern China demonstrated relatively stable and high performance across all years. Meanwhile, Guangxi, Qinghai, and Guizhou showed potential for reducing undesirable output by over 80% annually. Changes in scores for 20, 19, and 20 provinces were driven by differences in production frontier technologies over time. A comparative evaluation incorporating desirable output offers an additional perspective on performance measurement.

This research presents a framework for assessing road safety performance using both undesirable and desirable outputs and offers insights for policymakers to understand regional safety variations under diverse economic contexts.