New Challenges in Road Safety Evaluation: Towards the Development of an Evolutionary Framework

As road safety issues become increasingly complex and involve various stakeholders, designing of safety actions as on-board vehicle safety systems or public policy measures needs knowledge that describes the performance level to fulfil the objectives. Performance is assessed by evaluating designed actions as regards their functional specifications. By its ability to create new knowledge, evaluation is also used to improve existing actions or to specify road safety strategies. However, given the complexity of the evaluation activity and its context, experts consider that the existing knowledge is insufficient. One considers that this situation reflects the lack of a theoretical framework. In particular, there is no way to identify emerging assessment issues due to the insertion of new safety systems and the emergence of new users’ behaviours. In this paper, we introduce a framework that describes the design of the evaluation methods in the field of road safety. It is used as a guide to build new evaluation models for specific stakeholders and viewpoints. This framework is based on the identification of the objectives to be achieved and the use of the evaluators’ expertise.