Modelling for baseline road safety performance

Assessing the ability of Victoria's arrive alive 2008-2017 road safety strategy to meet its ambitious targets including a 30% reduction in deaths and serious injuries requires an understanding of the range of factors that may affect road trauma outcomes against which the package of initiatives in the strategy is acting against. This study had two key objectives. The first was to estimate robust statistical models of baseline trends in road safety outcomes relevant to arrive alive 2008-2017, namely fatalities and serious injuries, for the period prior to the introduction of the strategy. The primary purpose of estimating these models was to provide a forecast of likely trends in road trauma during the period of the strategy that would have been expected to have been observed in the absence of the strategy being implemented. Estimated forecasts could then be used as the basis for strategy modelling activities. The second and related objective of the project was to identify in the fitted models, key socio-economic measures that are related to road trauma outcomes and to interpret the influence these factors might have on the ability of the strategy to meet its targets for road trauma reduction. Understanding the influence of factors external to strategy activities is critical in order to understand whether strategy targets have been met with the assistance of such factors and hence may not be sustainable in the longer term, or whether targets are not likely to be met due to the factors hence dictating the need to put extra resources into the strategy in order to meet the targets.