Measuring Traffic Safety Culture toward Achieving Road Safety Performance: A DEA Approach with Undesirable Inputs-Outputs

The main purpose of this paper is to propose a new purely data-driven method for measuring impact of road safety culture based only on the aggregated data on traffic safety indicators rather than on questionnaire surveys. The paper proposes the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) with undesirable inputs-outputs for quantitative assessment of the impact on road fatalities of road safety culture. This method determines a number of road safety factors and then distinguishes between the effects of specified factors and the cultural factors. The applicability and usefulness of the proposed DEA are illustrated in a real-world application for assessment of the impact of road safety culture on Iran provincial road fatalities in the time period of two years. Results of DEA enable differentiating between provinces according to the impact of cultural aspects on fatality rate. Moreover, results show that road safety culture on average has improved in the time period of two years. The results of this study may be considered as a basis for traffic safety culture (TSC) interventions at provincial level. This paper provides a new opportunity to look at road safety culture across provincial road transportation systems in Iran and represents a critical step toward understanding relationship between safety culture and safety performance.