Interdisciplinary Approaches to Road Safety Improvement

Abstract

Road traffic injuries are one of the most important socio-economic and public health issues on the global level. Road crashes based on reports made by the World Health Organization cause a death of more than 1.19 million people every year and this is highly disfavored to the low- and middle-income countries. Traditional methods of safety on the road, which have focused mainly on engineering and enforcement, have proved inadequate in the regard of the multifactorial and intricate nature of the traffic accidents. The paper provides a theoretical explanation of an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates engineering, data science, behavior psychology, and the social policy, urban planning, and healthcare to improve road safety scores. The paper includes an overview of the contemporary paradigms of road safety and outlines the need to have systematic and interdisciplinary interventions. The proposed model will integrate the knowledge of transportation engineering, artificial intelligence, social health, and social science to deliver the best infrastructure design, driver behavior, emergency response, and inform the evidence-based policymaking. High-tech means of data analytics and machine learning are used to forecast areas vulnerable to accidents and risky behaviors, and the behavioral interventions are aimed at human error, which is the most common cause of accidents. The research methodology used was based on mixed-method approach which involved both the quantitative analysis of accident data and also involved the qualitative method of interviewing the stakeholders. The infrastructure risk concern patterns were assessed using simulation based modeling and geographic information systems (GIS). Moreover, the effectiveness of regulatory frameworks and community-based programs was determined through policy analysis. The findings show that interdisciplinary interventions cause a statistically significant decrease in the number of accidents and the severity of accidents. This study will build integrated road safety ecosystem that will be able to match technology innovativeness with human-friendly design and control. The results indicate that to implement sustainable road safety measures there should be a balanced interdisciplinary and interinstitutional co-ordination. The framework that is proposed may be used by policy-makers, researchers, and practitioners that are interested in applying holistic road safety measures in different socio-economic settings