Rail
Safety Management Systems
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
21 December 2018
- Management commitment to establishing safety policies and objectives
- Inclusion of explicit safety (non-punitive) reporting procedures
- Safety performance monitoring and measurement
- Identification of accountable management employees
- Appointment of key safety personnel responsible for safety oversight and promotion
- Implementation of a risk management process to identify hazards and associated risks
- Safety training at management and employee levels
Safer City Streets: Global Benchmarking for Urban Road Safety
Research Report, Policy Insights,
20 November 2018
- Develop mobility observatories in cities.
- Collect traffic casualty data from hospitals, not only from police records.
- Adopt ambitious targets to reduce the number of casualties.
- Focus on protecting vulnerable road users.
- Use appropriate indicators to measure the safety of vulnerable road users in cities.
- Estimate daytime population to improve the comparability of traffic safety statistics.
- Prioritise research on urban road crashes.
The Impact of Alliances in Container Shipping
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
2 November 2018
- Adopt a presumption toward repeal of shipping-specific block exemptions from competition law.
- Improve project appraisal for port and hinterland infrastructure and adopt common principles for port pricing.
- Establish more coherent ports policies to clarify roles and reduce risk of creating over-capacity.
The Social Impacts of Road Pricing
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
10 October 2018
- Make demand management and congestion reduction the primary objective of road pricing.
- Differentiate road pricing by location and time.
- Combine road pricing and public transport planning to improve efficiency.
- Examine the combined effects of scheme design and mitigation to understand distributional impacts.
- Consider the use of discounts and exemptions carefully.
- Develop road pricing as part of an intervention package to achieve better utilisation of urban space.
- Reconcile economic, practical and political aspects in the design of road pricing schemes.
- Differentiate charges and consider adopting a rules-based pricing approach.
Safer Roads with Automated Vehicles?
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
22 May 2018
- Reinforce the Safe System approach to ensure automated vehicles are used safely.
- Apply Vision Zero thinking to automated driving.
- Avoid safety performance being used to market competing automated vehicles.
- Carefully assess the safety impacts of systems that share driving tasks between humans and machines.
- Require reporting of safety-relevant data from automated vehicles.
- Develop and use a staged testing regime for automated vehicles.
- Establish comprehensive cybersecurity principles for automated driving.
- Ensure the functional isolation of safety-critical systems and that connectivity does not compromise cybersecurity or safety.
- Provide clear and targeted messaging of vehicle capabilities.
Defining, Measuring and Improving Air Connectivity
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
16 May 2018
- Adapt the use of connectivity metrics to specific policy challenges.
- Use a combination of approaches to assess potential knock-on effects that policy or strategy changes may have on air connectivity.
- Involve all aviation stakeholders in the policy process of developing air connectivity metrics.
- Make systematic use of air connectivity metrics to evaluate the performance of the national aviation sector and improve decision-making.
Blockchain and Beyond: Encoding 21st Century Transport
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
16 May 2018
- Public authorities must prepare for a much more networked and meshed world.
- Take into account changes in data science and technology when developing Mobility as a Service.
- Look beyond initial cryptocurrency applications of distributed ledger technologies.
- Governments should help deploy the building blocks that enable wider uptake of distributed ledgers.
- Apply blockchain technology now for slow and (relatively) small transport use cases; anticipate next generation distributed ledger technologies for “big and fast” applications to be deployed later.
- Governments should develop algorithmic code-based regulation to accompany the uptake of distributed ledger technologies.
Integrating Urban Public Transport Systems and Cycling
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
25 April 2018
- Design interchange stations to provide secure, uncongested conditions for transfer by the shortest routes possible.
- Provide adequate bike parking areas at stations and stops.
- Integrate ticketing and information systems as well as the physical transport infrastructure.
- Establish integrated urban transport plans in consultation with stakeholders and the public.
Speed and Crash Risk
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
28 March 2018
- Reduce the speed on roads as well as speed differences between vehicles.
- Set speed limits according to Safe System principles.
- Improve infrastructure and enforcement if speed limits are to be increased.
- Use automatic speed control to reduce speed effectively.
Alcohol-Related Road Casualties in Official Crash Statistics
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
6 February 2018
- Review how data on alcohol-related road crashes is collected.
- Aim for a systematic alcohol testing of every road user actively involved in a serious crash.
- Use statistical analysis methods to better estimate the number of alcohol-related road fatalities.
- Harmonise definitions of alcohol-related road casualties.
- Conduct future research on how to measure alcohol-related road crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists.
Zero Road Deaths and Serious Injuries
Research Report, Policy Insights,
1 October 2016
- Think safe roads, not safer roads.
- Provide strong, sustained leadership for the paradigm shift to a Safe System.
- Foster a sense of urgency to drive change.
- Underpin aspirational goals with concrete operational targets.
- Establish shared responsibility for road safety.
- Apply a results-focussed way of working among road safety stakeholders.
- Leverage all parts of a Safe System for greater overall effect and so that if one part fails the other parts will still prevent serious harm.
- Use a Safe System to make city traffic safe for vulnerable road users.
- Build Safe System capacity in low and middle-income countries to improve road safety in rapidly motorising parts of the world.
- Support data collection, analysis and research on road traffic as a Safe System.
Road Safety Annual Report 2016
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
14 July 2016
- Focus road safety policy on vulnerable road users.
- Enforce drink driving laws, speed limits and the wearing of seat belts and motorcycle helmets.
- Analyse the reasons behind the relatively poor road safety performance in 2015 and adapt policies.
Data-Driven Transport Policy
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
9 May 2016
- Data is being collected in ways that support new business models in transport but challenge existing regulation.
- Transport data is shifting to the private sector and away from the public sector.
- The shift of data ownership from the public to the private sector may ultimately imply a shift in control.
- Transport authorities should account for biases in the data they use and encourage use of adequate metadata.
- Mandatory private-public data sharing should be limited. Only where clear benefits to all parties exist and public authorities have capacity to handle the data should they be considered.
- Data sharing does not necessarily mean sharing raw data.
- Whatever data is collected and whoever holds it, dats should be an integral part of more flexible regulation of emerging transport services.
Improving Safety for Motorcycle, Scooter and Moped Riders
Research Report, Policy Insights,
7 October 2015
- The powered two-wheeler population is increasing and plays a significant role in mobility.
- Powered two-wheeler (PTW) riders are at far greater risk than car drivers.
- Poor perception and control are frequent failures that lead to PTW crashes.
- A Safe System approach is required to improve the safety of PTWs.
- The helmet is the most important source of protection against severe injuries and death.
- Advances in car technology can also bring positive safety benefits to PTW users. There are a number of new technologies, such as forward collision warning, blind spot information and vulnerable road user protection systems, which can prevent collisions, including those with PTW riders, pedestrians and cyclists.
Road Infrastructure Safety Management
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
6 October 2015
- Benchmark road infrastructure against good practices in other countries.
- Implement new minimum safety standards for road infrastructure.
- Continue evaluation and research to quantify safety impacts of planning decisions.
- Implement suitable Road Infrastructure Safety Management procedures for each stage of road development including planning design, pre-opening and full operation.
- Make Road Infrastructure Safety Management procedures legally binding.
- Involve both road and health authorities when developing road accident data bases.
- Assure adequate institutional management capacity and investment levels.
- Use existing tools and guidelines; adopt second-best solutions where state-of-the-art solutions are not feasible.
- Identify the Road Safety Infrastructure Management procedures that fit specific needs and understand barriers to implementation.
- Share good practices of Road infrastructure Safety Management procedures and intervention measures.
- Monitor the safety performance of road infrastructure.
- Develop self-explaining roads.
Why Does Road Safety Improve When Economic Times Are Hard?
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
5 October 2015
- There is clear evidence that when economic growth declines, and particularly when unemployment increases, road safety improves.
- The financial and economic crises which started in 2007 were accompanied by marked falls in annual numbers of road deaths in most OECD countries.
- It is important to understand how much of the accelerated reduction in numbers of deaths during the downturn that began in 2008 was attributable to the changed economic conditions.
- The economic downturn in 2009-10 may well have contributed to about two-thirds of the decrease in fatalities from 2008.
- The recent downturn has had repercussions on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and unemployment rate and has influenced the number of road deaths through a reduction in vehicle kilometres driven, especially by young men and by heavy goods vehicles, a reduction in speeding and in drink-driving, and a reduction in learning to drive by young men.
- Policy makers need to take careful account of these results when setting road safety targets and when designing road safety strategies for the future.
The Impact of Mega-Ships
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
30 April 2015
- Cost savings from bigger container ships are decreasing.
- The transport costs due to larger ships could be substantial.
- Supply chain risks related to mega-container ships are rising.
- Public policies need to better take account of this and act accordingly.
- Further increase of maximum container ship size would raise ransport costs.