FAT-SCHRIFTENREIHE 368
Road traffic accidents remain to be a leading cause of death worldwide with roughly 1.3 million fatalities annually. To develop new safety approaches according to real-world challenges, accurate information is needed. Therefore, road safety experts are constantly looking for real-world data to answer the open challenges and ultimately reach “Vision Zero”.The Global Safety Database (GSD) offers access to an one of its kind up-to-date repository of road traffic accident statistics and databases on a meta-data level for road safety analyses.One main objective is the compilation of international data sources, for which a data management system has been developed. In addition to the inventory of road accident data sources, a questionnaire created by road safety experts is used to check the applicability of data sources for specific questions. Therefore, an automated and dynamic matching process enables comparing variables representing the questions with the existing data source content in the GSD. The results are stored in a result matrix which indicates the proportion of variables that correspond to the variables necessary to answer the research question for each data source investigated. In order to identify similarities and differences in road safety within the countries, a clustering methodology is developed to point out the possibilities and limitations of projecting information from the initial countries to other areas. The assessment of the representativeness of the individual data sources is the basis for the clustering. From a general perspective, the GSD is an essential tool pushing forward the worldwide harmonisation of traffic accident statistics and databases. Knowledge about the real-world accident scenery by bringing important databases together empowers the data-driven development which is eventually a key bringing us one step closer to a road system without casualties, the achievement of the Vision Zero.