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A Cost Curve to Improve Road Safety
Giancarlo Ghislanzoni, Gilad Myerson, and Alessandro Faure Ragani
By more fully evaluating available countermeasures, stakeholders can focus on the most effective ones.
Each year, traffic crashes kill more than 1.2 million people around the world and injure up to 50 million.1 In fact, they are the leading cause of death among people 15 to 29 years old2 and cost the global economy around $518 billion.3 Many of these casualties are preventable, but governments can have difficulty knowing where to begin. There are tested ways to improve road safety, but a lot of them are not widely known, so it’s challenging to find all available countermeasures, sort through them, and determine which are most relevant for a particular area. With ever-tighter budgets facing national governments and localities—which have primary responsibility for traffic laws, vehicle-safety regulations, and developing and maintaining road infrastructure—they often must make difficult choices.