Surrogate Measures for Traffic Safety Evaluation in Developing Countries: An Application Toward Sustainable Safety

Road traffic crashes have significant negative social, economic, and infrastructure consequences, particularly in developing countries. The methods for evaluating the causal factors to identify appropriate interventions and to mitigate the problem are causes of great concern in those countries. One of the major reasons is that the evaluation methods are still based on traditional approaches, which mainly rely on the reported crash records. The underreporting coupled with the incomplete and inconsistent recording of crashes is a major issue in such settings. Poor timelines, ethical issues, biasness, and human error are also critical issues. Using a case study from Bangladesh, an assessment of the data quality of reported crash databases is presented in this article. The approach offers a means to develop and apply a robust method that can yield targeted safety measures without the need for using crash data. The application of traffic conflict techniques, which has gained research interest as a proactive surrogate approach, could be a better alternative. However, the testing and application of this approach are still confined to the lane-based homogeneous traffic environment, which mainly prevails in developed countries. Considering the traffic characteristics and limited facilities in developing countries, this article outlines an adapted framework for safety evaluation using a traffic conflict technique. The adapted technique has been applied in a major highway section of Bangladesh and validated by comparing the characteristics of the estimated conflicts and real crash data. Finally, future research directions for achieving sustainable road safety objectives in developing countries are outlined.