PERSPECTIVES FOR SURROGATE SAFETY STUDIES IN EAST-EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
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Summary
This paper addresses the limitations of traditional road safety analysis, which relies on historical accident data, particularly in the context of East-European countries. As road safety improves and accident frequencies decrease, practitioners face a "data scarcity" problem where low accident counts render statistical analysis unreliable. Furthermore, traditional methods suffer from significant under-reporting, especially for vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists, and lack detailed information on the causal processes leading to crashes. The authors argue that surrogate safety measures, which analyze near-miss events or traffic conflicts rather than actual accidents, offer a proactive and more efficient alternative for safety assessment. The study reviews the current state of these methods, their theoretical foundations, and the technological tools available to support their implementation in East-European contexts. The paper synthesizes existing literature and frameworks to evaluate surrogate safety measures. It outlines the theoretical basis of these measures, such as the Safety Pyramid, which posits that severe accidents are rare outcomes of a larger number of less severe, observable events. The authors review various surrogate indicators, including Time-to-Collision (TTC) and Post-Encroachment Time (PET), and discuss theoretical approaches linking these surrogates to accident risk, such as conversion coefficients, Extreme Value Theory, and causal models. Additionally, the paper examines emerging technologies for data collection, categorizing them into semi-automated video analysis tools, fully automated "watch-dog" systems, and sensor fusion techniques. The analysis is contextualized by comparing road safety trends in Western and Eastern Europe, highlighting that while Eastern Europe lags behind, it follows similar improvement patterns and will soon face the same data limitations. Key findings indicate that while surrogate safety methods have a long history in Western countries, they have not yet been widely adopted by practitioners in Eastern Europe, remaining largely within academic circles. The paper identifies that the high volume of accidents in Eastern Europe currently allows for easier validation of surrogate measures against actual crash data, presenting a unique opportunity for methodological development. However, challenges remain, including the need to adapt indicators for vulnerable road users, validate measures against changing traffic cultures and vehicle safety standards, and address legal barriers related to video data protection. Technological advancements, particularly in automated video analysis, are shown to mitigate the labor-intensive nature of traditional conflict techniques, though issues regarding detection accuracy for smaller road users and equipment costs persist. The significance of this work lies in its recommendation to integrate surrogate safety measures into daily road safety practice in East-European countries. The authors conclude that as accident numbers decline, these proactive tools will become essential for evaluating safety interventions and understanding risk factors, particularly for vulnerable road users whose accidents are frequently under-reported. By adopting these methods, practitioners can overcome the statistical limitations of sparse accident data and gain deeper insights into traffic safety dynamics. The paper highlights the need for further research to refine indicators for specific user groups and enhance automated data collection tools to ensure they are feasible and accurate for widespread practical application.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| 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