Decision Support System for Urban Road Safety: A Comparison Between Two Different City Size

Among the objectives of the European Union in the field of road safety there is “Vision Zero”, which aims to halve the number of deaths in road accidents by 2030 and reach zero deaths by 2050. The present contribution proposes a methodology for investigating and identifying preliminary indicators of road safety in urban networks for the development of a Decision Support System to assist road safety managers. The proposed approach for data research and urban road safety analysis is applied on two different urban scales: a metropolis and a city with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. The identification of urban routes and their overlap, along with the integration of various urban traffic elements such as incidents, traffic flows, and urban attractors within a GIS environment, can enable the correlation of multiple layers related to infrastructure, safety, and accessibility, involving different actors in the decision-making process. At a practical level, this paper presents potential survey choices for identifying safety-related indicators according to the observation area. It is also highlighted how research in metropolitan cities like Madrid can benefit from a high availability of data, while smaller cities require alternative methods and data to build thematic databases. Future studies will focus on selecting the definitive KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to be used in the creation of a DSS for Urban Road Safety.