Road safety performance rating through PSI-PRIDIT: A planning tool for designing policies and identifying best practices for EAS countries

Abstract

Road traffic injuries are a leading cause of socio-economic loss in East Asia Summit (EAS) countries. A regular performance rating to monitor progress and calibrate interventions is crucial for road safety improvement, helping to save human lives and reducing economic losses. To this end, we propose a new and easy-to-adapt multi-criteria decision-making method for systematically rating the road safety performance of the EAS countries, the preference selection index with principal component analysis of RIDIT scores (PSI-PRIDIT) (scores of a distribution relative to an identified distribution integral transformation). Using the results from other classical methods as a reference, we rank the EAS countries robustly and place them into three groups over the last decade (2009–2019), based on the composite road safety development index. Our findings should be useful for EAS countries to detect underlying problems and identify best practices, as well as provide government officials, policymakers, and practitioners with meaningful guidelines on the adoption of successful road safety measures. Overall, the proposed rating framework should help to strengthen the institutional capacity for road safety management and addresses road safety issues.