Alternative approaches to network-wide road safety assessment
DOI: 10.1186/s12544-026-00767-8
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Summary
This study addresses the limitations of the Network-wide Road Safety Assessment (NWA) methodology mandated by EU Directive 2019/1936/EC. While NWA combines reactive (crash-based) and proactive (design-based) analyses, it suffers from statistical weaknesses, including an inability to quantify safety performance differences, poor handling of statistical uncertainty, and instability with low crash frequencies. To overcome these issues, the authors propose and evaluate three alternative statistical approaches: the Rate Ratio (RR) test, Bayesian Inference (BI), and the Empirical Bayes (EB) method. The research was conducted using a dataset of 4,459 road sections (7826 total segments) from the Czech Republic’s motorway and primary road network, covering 8,509 km. Data included road design characteristics for proactive analysis and fatal/injury crash records from 2021 to 2023 for reactive analysis. The RR test was employed to provide formal hypothesis testing for crash rate ratios. The BI method utilized a conditional binomial model to estimate the probability that a road section’s risk exceeds that of its reference group, incorporating prior expert information. The EB method combined observed crash frequencies with predicted frequencies from negative binomial regression models to correct for regression-to-mean bias. The results demonstrated that all three proposed methods outperformed the standard NWA approach. The RR test provided formal statistical significance testing, effectively reducing false positives compared to NWA’s coarse classification rules. The BI method offered a robust probabilistic framework that improved reliability for sections with low crash counts and allowed for the explicit estimation of the magnitude of safety performance differences. The EB method successfully identified the most influential design factors, revealing that no reduction factors were statistically significant for motorways, while only two to three factors were significant for primary roads. The study concludes that these alternative methods provide statistically sound and robust tools for national-level road safety management. By addressing the statistical gaps in the current NWA guidelines—specifically regarding uncertainty, low data volumes, and the lack of quantitative risk interpretation—these approaches offer a more reliable basis for prioritizing safety interventions. The findings suggest that adopting these methods can enhance the precision and validity of road safety assessments across European member states.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-20 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.
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- Empirical Findings: crash risk outcomes