Best practice analysis of action for road safety in Iran amongst the leading developing countries using an optimized success indicator

Abstract

This study evaluates Iran amongst emerging societies which can be considered as development benchmarks specifically in the field of road safety. The five pillars of road safety development were analyzed within three main layers of the road safety management system consisting of institutional management functions, interventions, and results. The main objective of this study is to introduce a ranking criterion that explains the success in each road safety pillar using the concepts of the managing by result and also to identify best practices within a set of developing countries, focusing on the archived results for Iran. A virtual performance indicator shown by ‘S’ was defined as the success score of each pillar in the decade of action for each country to achieve the targets of decreasing road fatalities. This virtual indicator as well as two other indicator classes (intervention outputs and final outcomes) go into an optimization problem using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. It is concluded that the S value shows the quality weight of the actions taken in countries and could be a suitable numeric indicator for benchmarking the best practices. The success of Iran in advancing the interventions in two pillars of safer roads and mobility (safer infrastructure) and safer road users (enhanced enforcement) has been higher than the other activities. The actions needed to be taken in Iran include the development of vehicle safety, the structure of road safety management, and post-crash response in order of preference. This country requires to follow best practices in Turkey and Romania which were identified as benchmark countries for Iran. The target value for the fatality rate per 100,000 population in Iran was earned 12.6.