DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL ROAD SAFETY PROGRAMME IN ISRAEL: BASELINE, COMPONENTS AND LESSONS

A law approved by the Israeli Parliament in 1997 determined road safety as a nationally important task. The same law empowered the newly established National Road Safety Authority with a control position as to the "safety budgets" of all the Ministries, and obliged it to develop a National Road Safety Program, to improve the road safety situation in the country within a 5-year period. The Program was developed by a group of experts, under the supervision of the Transportation Research Institute at the Technion. Based on a review of international experience, several principles were adopted in the Program development: 1. assigning a quantitative target for the program performance; in this context, a 15-25% reduction in severe injuries (fatalities and serious injuries) during a 5-year period from the Program beginning, was regarded as a challenge but achievable; 2. choosing the fields of activity, based, on the one hand, on the accident data analysis and, conversely, on available means of influence on the road safety situation; a "TOP TEN" - 10 leading fields of activity were defined for the Program, where each field corresponded to a specific safety issue (providing "forgiving" roadside conditions, blackspot treatments, etc.) and implied a number of definite ways of acting; 3. the Program aimed at building a joint framework for cooperative efforts of all ministries and other bodies involved in "road safety production"; and 4. the ways and sites of treatment were selected, having checked economic benefits associated with the resource allocation. The Program activities focus primarily on the reduction of severe accidents, however, estimating the economic potential of a treatment, "savings" in slight injuries were also accounted for. Averaged annual numbers and characteristics of accidents that occurred during 1995-1997 served as baseline data for all the evaluations performed. Considering each field of activity, a three stage process followed: 1- definition of the target groups; 2- evaluation of the expected effectiveness of the treatments considered; 3- definition of a scale of application attainable during the Program. With regards to the application scale, two types of activity were defined: a national-type (e.g., safety belts) where potential "injury savings" were estimated using average nationwide indices; and a "varying" type, i.e. those whose scale and sites of application depended on marginal cost-benefit considerations. The whole Program entails the allocation of more than 1.2 billion NIS (US $ 300 million), over a three-year period, where the emphases are set on road infrastructure improvements, and on automatic police enforcement. The Program structure and components, as well as the methodological lessons that could be learned from the Program development, are discussed in the paper.