ALTERING THE PATTERN OF TRAFFIC AND ACCIDENTS IN URBAN AREAS; A METHODOLOGY TO DETECT CHANGE --TRAFFIC SAFETY THEORY AND RESEARCH METHODS. APRIL 26-28, 1988, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS. SESSION II: MODELS FOR EVALUATION

Since 1982 TRRL has been leading an urban safety project which aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing a package of low-cost accident countermeasures to improve the safety of residential areas of typical British free-standing towns. In this paper a methodology is outlined which enables the monitoring of urban safety schemes. The monitoring programme allows an economic evaluation to be made of the main effects both in terms of changes in amounts and patterns of traffic and accidents. However, in routine applications of the resulting area wide approach, it is not envisaged that local authorities will have the budget, staff resources or need to monitor on an equivalent scale to that undertaken in the urban safety project. Even for routine monitoring purposes it is important to consider some aspects of experimental design described in this paper, especially with respect to monitoring of accident patterns where changes in number of accidents are often the only input into an economic evaluation or justification for expenditure on such schemes. For the covering abstract of the conference, session II, see 813205.