RESUMO
Increased traffic volumes worldwide have resulted in an increased number of road accident injuries and mortalities. This global phenomenon motivated the United Nations (UN) to initiate a decade-long global road safety plan in 2010. In response, Saudi Arabia concurrently initiated a comprehensive road safety program, supported by detailed and comprehensive road safety data for the Eastern Province (EP) of Saudi Arabia. The contributed EP-Traffic-Mortality-and-Policy-Interventions Dataset provides multidimensional road safety data for 2010-2020 via two primary and five secondary data subsets. The first primary subset provides road accident mortality data. The five secondary data subsets reflect road accident mortalities at different time scales and administrative (provincial or governorate) levels. The second primary subset provides details of traffic safety policy interventions implemented during the same period. Researchers and policymakers can use this comprehensive dataset to study accident mortality patterns across various geospatial and time scales and analyze the effectiveness of policies intended to mitigate road accident mortalities.
RESUMO
Extensive prior research has statistically analyzed the impact of infrastructural, policy, and environmental factors on road accidents, injuries, and mortalities. Most of these studies assumed long-term temporal stability in road safety data. These studies were later criticized for ignoring structural shifts in data over time caused by varying systemic influences such as socioeconomic and environmental factors, as well as major changes to road safety rules and networks. In this work, we proposed a novel four-phase methodology that identifies structural shifts or breaks in the road safety data and subsequently evaluates the role of various factors (including road safety interventions) in causing these breaks. The method is generalized, allowing different modeling bases and assumptions on the underlying data distribution. To demonstrate the merits of this methodology, we used it to investigate road accident mortality patterns in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and its subregions for the period 2010-2020, when a series of road safety interventions were introduced. The case study analysis revealed the varying impact of these interventions at both the provincial and governorate levels. These results can be used to evaluate the efficacy of road safety interventions. The lessons learned can help to develop more robust road safety management programs.