Benchmarking Road Safety in Northern Ireland

The Road Safety Division (RSD) within Northern Ireland’s Department of the Environment (DOE) is responsible for Northern Ireland’s Road Safety Strategy (RSS). The latest figures show that the current road safety target reductions, for the ten years up to 2012, had already been achieved by 2008 and so are likely to be maintained or exceeded in 2012.

Despite this success, the proportion of Northern Ireland’s population killed by or seriously injured as a result of road traffic collisions remains higher than for Great Britain and other high performing countries.

The Public Accounts Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly has recommended that targets should be set to maintain this improvement, and to close the gap between the performances in Northern Ireland and other leading European countries including GB.

The overall objectives of this project, as defined by DOE, are:

– To conduct a literature review of key research applicable to the benchmarking process, from UK, Irish and international sources.

– To design an appropriate benchmarking exercise for Northern Ireland using this approach, identifying the extent and likely causes of the differences in road safety records of Northern Ireland and GB.

– To carry out a benchmarking exercise for Northern Ireland using this approach, identifying a suitable set of comparators from within GB.

– To critically assess the effectiveness and outcome of this benchmarking exercise, identifying the extent and likely causes of the differences in road safety records of Northern Ireland and GB.