Welcome
Overview
Traffic crashes have a major impact to European society, in 2008 over 38,000 road users died and over 1.2 million were injured. The economic cost is immense and has been estimated at over €160 billion for the EU 15 alone. The European Commission and National Governments place a high priority on reducing casualty numbers and have a series introduced targets and objectives.
The experience of the best-performing countries is that the most effective policies are based on an evidence-based, scientific approach. Information about the magnitude, nature and context of the crashes is essential while detailed analyses of the role of infrastructure, vehicles and road users enables new policies to be developed.
The EU funded SafetyNet project established the European Road Safety Observatory to bring together data and knowledge to support safety policy-making. The project developed the framework of the Observatory and the protocols for the data and knowledge, the ERSO is now a part of the DG-Move website http://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/index_en.htm.
The DaCoTA project will add to the strength and wealth of information in the Observatory by enhancing the existing data and adding new road safety information. The main areas of work include
- Developing the link between the evidence base and new road safety policies
- Establishing a Pan-European Accident Investigation Network
- Bringing a wide variety of data together for users to manipulate
- Predicting accident trends, presenting data to policy makers
- Intelligent safety system evaluation
- Naturalistic driving observations
the European Commission Directorate General for Mobility and Transport