A New Framework to Evaluate Crash Risk for Road Traffic Safety Management System

Road safety issue is becoming increasingly important for both public administrations and road users. Therefore, tools for assessing and managing safety performance take on even more relevance. Previous research has proposed different types of Road Safety Management Systems but, to the best of our knowledge, only a few of these studies have focused on recent road safety regulations such as the ISO 39001:2012. This paper proposes a new framework that evaluates the crash risk for administrative areas according to ISO39001:2012. First, this framework identifies the safety factors. Next, it specifies the risk components in terms of frequency, severity and exposure factors that may affect road crashes. Then, combining these components in a risk crash function, it is possible to build a safety performance ranking for each administrative areas. The viability of the proposed methodology was tested on the administrative areas of all Italian provinces, using over 500,000 road crashes data recorded by the Italian National Institute of Statistics ISTAT between 2015 and 2017, which were merged for the 107 Italian provinces. The results helped ranking the road safety of the Italian provinces according to a scale with four risk scores: maximum, high, medium and low. The findings show how the implementation of the proposed framework could help public administrations in managing the safety performance of their road networks and, also, qualify them according to the recent safety norms.