Abstract:
Within the European Commission’s efforts to reduce the number of road fatalities, a Programme Support Action was promoted to support Member States in collecting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for road safety. These indicators contribute to the unders-tanding of selected issues that influence overall road safety performance and can be used to measure the progress and effectiveness of planned road safety initiatives.
Several KPIs are being collected by the 19 participating EU Member States, namely on: speed, safety belt use, wearing protective equipment, alcohol, distraction, vehicle safety, post-crash care and infrastructure. LNEC has committed to the collection and analysis of two of the Portuguese KPIs: Speed (percentage of vehicles travelling within the speed limit); and Distraction (percentage of drivers NOT using a handheld mobile de-vice). This paper presents the main challenges faced in measuring the indicators and the results obtained are discussed, especially in what concerns differences between road categories.