Evaluating the road safety of local municipalities with application of GRA: Montenegro case study

Abstract

Evaluation of road safety is the core of road safety management, and to prevent traffic accidents, an understanding of the factors that cause them is essential. Currently, road safety experts show great interest in finding one fair approach to evaluate and compare road safety situations in different territories. Previously, the assessment of the situation and comparisons were based on the size of the consequences in traffic accidents but recently, the road safety experts turned to observing and comparing safety indicators as a more humane approach, given that in this way critical aspects can be seen at an early stage and before accidents occur. Over time, an approach of describing the road safety situation with a composite index has been developed in which a large number of indicators have been aggregated. The composite traffic safety index is a useful tool in assessing the safety situation that provides comparison, monitoring and communication between different territories and defines the elements of the system that need to be improved. The methodological development of the index construction continues today. The main steps of the mentioned process are the selection of the relevant set of indicators and determining the influence of each of them. In this paper, a set of ten hierarchical road safety indicators in terms of final outcomes, the road users’ behavior and basic territory information are weighted with grey relational analysis and aggregated in order to calculate one composite index score of 21 municipalities of Montenegro. Grey relational analysis can measure the relative importance among indicators, implying that those with higher grey weight values are more significant than those with lower grey weights. However, it cannot be claimed that indicator with the highest weight has the greatest impact on accidents occurrence, but it certainly indicates a field where strategies can be adopted to improve level of road safety.