Knowledge about data

National accident data provide insight into the size and composition of the road safety problem. Relating accident data to exposure data produces estimates of road safety risk. Risk estimates are especially relevant for making predictions about future road safety situation and for making international comparisons. What is road safety risk, what are different ways to calculate risk and what are the pros and cons of different risk estimates? These and other questions are answered in the Road Safety Risk section of knowledge about data.

Accidents are final outcomes of a road traffic system. Monitoring the operational conditions of traffic, which means monitoring how road users behave in traffic, can help to explain why road safety risk changes. What do we know about appropriate safety performance indicators? The knowledge about this is communicated in the Safety Performance Indicators section.

Knowledge about data also entails the know-how to analyse the data with appropriate statistical methods. In the case of road safety data complications of analysis arise out of the fact that road safety data comprise a time series or that road safety data have a hierarchical structure. The section Linking and analysing road safety data discusses these data complications and possible solutions.

Finally, it is advisable to correct for underreporting and differences in injury recording so that EU-road safety comparisons include the full range of injury severities. Read more about the problem of underreporting and the compatibility of EU road safety data.