Safer City Streets: Global Benchmarking for Urban Road Safety

• December 12th, 2018

The International Transport Forum collected mobility and road safety data from 31 cities, the majority of which in Europe, 10 in the Americas and 2 in Oceania. Indicators were developed to evaluate, monitor and benchmark road safety outcomes. A network of road safety experts was developed in parallel to support data collection and to exchange experiences with road safety analysis and policy making. Members of this network met in Paris on 20-21 April 2017, in Brussels on 7-8 December 2017 and in Rome on 11-12 April 2018. Together, the global city-level road safety database and the network of road safety experts make up the Safer City Streets initiative. It is delivered by the International Transport Forum in partnership with the International Automobile Federation (FIA), and with support from the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis group (IRTAD).

Our analysis reveals considerable differences in road safety performance between cities, suggesting cities should do more to share best practice and learn from their peers. Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, together called vulnerable road users, make up about eight out of ten road users killed in city traffic. Almost half of road fatalities in cities are pedestrians, a user group which experiences a risk of fatality ten times higher than the risk experienced by car occupants. This analysis has yet to control for potentially confounding factors and to examine the number of third-party casualties but clearly makes the case for a greater focus on pedestrians in cities. Injury data are not (yet) comparable across cities. This is due to a combination of inconsistent definitions and reporting rates and the absence of data from hospital admissions. When city-level road safety performance analysis is limited to fatalities, much insight and statistical significance are lost, reducing the relevance of monitoring efforts. Developing reliable data on injuries is therefore important.