Modelling the effect of traffic safety culture on road fatalities: linear and nonlinear stochastic frontier analysis

The literature on measuring road safety culture has been dominated by the use of questionnaires. Some researchers criticize this approach for the untraceable relationship between the questionnaire items and traffic safety culture, the disagreement between the respondents’ thoughts and behavior, and the social desirability bias. This paper aims to use time-variant stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to quantitatively estimate the effect of road safety culture on road fatalities. This study contributes to the safety culture assessment by proposing a new methodology with two new features. Firstly, its parametric and flexible nature allows using any type of linear or nonlinear frontiers to describe the relationship between system characteristics and fatalities. Secondly, this analysis is purely data-driven; therefore, there is no need to use qualitative methods like questionnaires. The real-world applicability and significance of the proposed SFA framework are illustrated by evaluating the effect. Results show the robustness of SFA for determining the effect of road safety culture on road fatalities.