ABSTRACT
Analyses of road safety at levels below the national level have usually compared selected rates of road safety (such as the road fatality rate in relation to demography). Fatality is calculated as follows:
FATALR FATAL
ij = (1)
where: FATALRij-traffic fatality rate in an i-th region in j-th year FATALij-number of fatalities of an i-th region in j-th year POPij-number of population of an i-th region in j-th
In order to create model that combines national and regional characteristics, data concerning the number of death casualties in a given region have been collected as well as additional characteristics that describe regions and countries. The reason for this approach was the fact that there were characteristics available on national level that could effectively differentiate safety levels in the regions of respective countries, though unfortunately they were unavailable on regional level of aggregation. On the other hand, respective regions of a given country differ among each other in terms of population density or road network concentration and these elements are worth considering in the model. Since significant dispersion of fatality rate has been observed, it was decided to model demographic index of fatalities on roads (FATALR) calculated
1 INTRODUCTION
In 1771 the first accident involving motor vehicle, a steam powered one, was reported. Since then several hundred million accidents have occurred, in which over 60 million people have died. Despite the activities being carried out with an aim to improve safety, over 1.2 m people die on roads each year, and even up to 50 million are injured. This is then a global issue of an epidemiologic nature. Scientists in Western Europe and United States for quite a long time have been searching for the cause of this situation. The issue is complex enough to be addressed by scientists from different fields: economy, mathematics, transport or medicine. However, so far they have focused on researches covering data for respective countries, without going deeper into differences between respective regions of a given country. Most frequently analysed were the figures of changes in number of casualties over time, by means of time series (Commandeur et al. 2012). In researches aimed at finding factors that could influence fatality on roads national product per capita (Van Beeck et al. 1991) and transport activity (Jamroz 2011) have been indicated. Unfortunately, transport activity is unavailable in regional databases. Therefore, the scientists often point to population density as a good substitute index, which may replace transport activity (Fridstrøm 1995). Literature studies showed that the researchers focus either on national characteristics or on regional characteristics alone, and do not combine both. In this paper the combination of national and regional characteristics in one model has been presented.
