Assessing Road Safety Development In Europe By Using Data Envelopment Analysis And Time Series Analysis

In spite of significant progress in anticipation,worldwide,more than 1.25 million people are killed every year and 20 to 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries due to road accidents.In this study,the road safety development in Europe during 1995-2016 is assessed.To express the road safety progress,the fatality risk is calculated which is measured by applying data envelopment analysis(DEA),using three common measures of exposure(i.e.,population,passenger cars,passenger-kilometres)as inputs and number of fatalities as output.Moreover,road safety development is assessed and predicted by applying the ARIMA model,and the effect of different explanatory variables on road safety performance is investigated by using a fixed effect model and an ARIMAX model.The results indicate that 2015 and 2016 are the best performing years of EU 27 because the best road safety performance is achieved in these years by most of the countries except Bulgaria,France,Nederland,Slovenia,and Finland.All the countries have improved significantly road safety during 1995-2016.The ARIMA model predicted that although during 2001-2010 most of the countries achieved a significant road safety improvement,the period of 2011-2020 will not show a prominent change.Three countries(Luxembourger,Hungary,and Bulgaria)will be relatively poor road safety performers during 2011-2020 because their road safety performance will improve only by less than 20%.Furthermore,the explanatory variables affect the road safety performance of Europe during 1995-2016 significantly.Economic conditions influence road safety performance in Europe during 1995-2016.The road safety performance was improved due to the betterment of the economic conditions of Europe.Young age people had statistically significantly negative relationship with road safety performance while old age people significant positive relationship with road safety performance.A country with higher alcohol consumption per capita is relied upon to have higher traffic casualty rates and fatality risk.Alcohol consumption decreased in Europe during 1995-2016 and thus had a statistically negative relationship with road safety.Hospital beds has a negative relationship with road safety,while train percentage has a positive relationship with the road safety performance in Europe.However,based on the results of the ARIMAX model,each country's road safety development is influenced by different explanatory variables.