Overview
Road accidents are currently ranked as the eighth largest cause of death in the world, and it is predicted that by the year 2020 they will be the third largest. The safety of vulnerable road users is a major concern in many European countries. Over 45,000 people are killed on the roads in the EC every year, and there are 1.5 million reported casualties. More than half of the accidents occur in urban areas, with a disproportionately large number of vulnerable road users being killed by cars. Nearly half the deaths in urban areas are now outside the vehicle, which brings into question the huge amounts spent on making vehicle safer for occupants, while little is currently being done about making them more pedestrian or cyclist-friendly. For the EU as a whole 55% of fatalities are car users but about one in six fatalities is a pedestrian and one in 16 is a cyclist.
The objective of DUMAS has been to produce a framework for the design and
evaluation of urban safety initiatives.
The main objectives of DUMAS were:
to collect, collate and report on research findings and current practice
relevant to urban safety management;
to investigate into specific important issues in detail, such as the
role of traffic management, accident data collection, speed management,
vulnerable road users, political factors and linking safety with other
initiatives such as the environment;
to involve towns and cities in partner countries, where safety
initiatives have been or are being implemented.
Funding
Results
DUMAS has:
- brought up a USM framework for the design and assessment of urban safety initiatives, bringing together the existing knowledge on the affects of safety measures with the overall planning and management of urban safety programmes;
- considered both interactions between engineers, politicians and the public, and the interactions with other urban initiatives;
- produced individual country 'state of the art' reports, along with an overall summary; l
- aunched town studies based on the new framework; and
- paved the way for the linkage of the design framework to a design manual that provides information and guidance on individual measures and their effectiveness.
Policy implications
Urban Safety Management is a complex, highly political and costly endeavour. For the past decade or so, the non-technical factors have usually emerged as the main barriers to implementation of USM schemes. USM is an area-wide approach that integrates all the disciplines found in town planning and management. These include traffic management, enforcement, education, public transport, town planning, etc, as well as road safety. Hence, the framework developed in DUMAS is hoped to be the impetus for more USM initiatives, underlining the importance of road safety in Europe and individual countries.