A general presentation of the SafetyCube Project was given by Prof. George Yannis at the CARE Experts meeting of the European Commission, which was held on 8^th October 2015 in Brussels.  Special emphasis was given to the objectives and the work programme of SafetyCube project regarding serious injuries and their costs.

The presentation is currently available:

 SafetyCube CARE Experts Meeting Yannis

The development and validation of the methodological framework is carried out within Work Package 3 , which will be implemented by the other Work Packages  (WP4 – behaviour, WP5 – infrastructure, WP6 – vehicle) .

As important first step and basis for the Decision Support System, it was agreed that Work Packages 4-6 should systematically collect and record studies evaluating risk factors and countermeasures. To record all studies in one system, they have all to be coded according to the same system. This turned out to be a big challenge, and the first attempts before the summer vacation had shown clear problems to deal with so many different types of studies and nevertheless achieve a registration that can be used as the basis for summaries and analyses.

During the Technical Meeting, on September 14, the new template and second coding exercise were thoroughly evaluated. While we were quite happy with the progress made, we also realized that next to some improvements on the template, we will have to supply very thorough training and instruction. The guidelines for the analysis of risk factors and evaluation of counter measures, which we have already started to produce since the beginning of the project, were restructured to be more focused on the task at hand, to enable SafetyCube partners to “dissect” studies they read: to understand the underlying design, code the results in the appropriate form, and judge the presence of possible biases.

By end of October, the guidelines and coding template will be finalized and distributed to the wider partnership. On the basis of studies supplied by each of the leaders of WP 4-7, a large scale training session at the November meeting in Gothenburg will be organised.

“SafetyCube Deliverable 2.1 Definition of user needs and hot topics” is now available as a result of the Work Package 2 activities.

The purpose of this report is to define user needs for the planned Decision Support System (DSS) and “hot topics” to be used as demonstrators in the project. A kick-off workshop was planned for the second month of the SafetyCube project to quickly engage stakeholders and identify key research topics addressing road safety.

The first goal of the workshop was to identify the requirements for a Decision Support System based on the needs of the intended end users. The second goal was to identify current and/or high priority issues that should be addressed in a DSS. These “hot topics” could be specific risk factors, safety effects, and cost-benefit analyses to be examined within the project. This consultation will ensure that the SafetyCube project is correctly oriented to address relevant road safety issues as well as establish examples for testing the DSS once completed.

This deliverable is an input to the technical work packages (WP3-WP8) of the project and is not a definitive analysis of the workshop results. The information gathered from the stakeholders must be reviewed separately in each work package to orient their specific activities.

The Deliverable is available below:

SafetyCube Deliverable 2.1 Definition of user needs and hot topics

The Stakeholder Workshop organised in the framework of the SafetyCube project took place with great success in Brussels on 17 June 2015 aiming at providing stakeholders’ input to be taken into account within the activities of the SafetyCube project.
More than 30 key experts attended the Workshop including representatives of competent Ministries, national and international road operators, NGOs and other road safety stakeholders, which contributed with ideas and their needs for the European Road Safety Decision Support System (DSS) for safety policy to be developed within the SafetyCube project, containing reliable and easily accessible information to identify the most cost-effective measures that address road safety problems. Special focus was given to key risk factors, safety effects and cost-benefit analyses to be examined within the DSS. Key presentations are now available:

Overview of SafetyCube project
Invited Speaker 1 – Current experience (Elvik)
Breakout Session 1
Invited Speaker 2 – Current Experience (Wismans)
Breakout Session 2
Breakout Session 3

The SafetyCube European Road Safety Decision Support System (DSS) is one of the key objectives of the SafetyCube project to better support evidence-based policy making. The SafetyCube results will be assembled in the form of a Decision Support System that will present for each suggested road safety measure: details of the risk factor tackled, the measure itself, the best estimate of casualty reduction effectiveness, the cost-benefit evaluation and the analytic background. While the development and evaluation of the measures will be developed into a format and structure that will enable industry, policy-makers and other stakeholders to access the information in an efficient manner within the DSS.

More information on DSS is available below:

SafetyCube-DSS-May 2015