Road
How Governments Can Bring Low-Emission Trucks to Our Roads – and Fast
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
13 December 2023
- Now or never. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, governments cannot let technological uncertainty be a barrier to action.
- Assess the likelihood. Governments need to carefully assess the likelihoods with which different technologies will deliver effective climate action. They must promote the most likely technologies, even with uncertainty.
- Bet on batteries. Battery-electric vehicles currently have the highest likelihood of successfully decarbonising road transport.
Using Safety Performance Indicators to Improve Road Safety: The case of Korea
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
10 December 2023
- Set safety targets. Ambitious road safety targets and concrete measures help to reduce the number of road fatalities and injuries quickly. Including meaningful performance indicators in road safety strategies is crucial to success.
- Prioritise vulnerable people. Pedestrians, cyclists and the elderly are most vulnerable in road traffic. Prioritise their safety by using road safety performance indicators to pave the way for more inclusive, protective road environments and reduce the risk of road traffic causing tragedies.
- Create a feedback loop. The insights gained from safety performance indicators must feed directly into improving road safety strategies. Creating a continuous feedback loop will make the strategies responsive to changes, measures more impactful and road traffic safer.
New but Used: The Electric Vehicle Transition and the Global Second-hand Car Trade
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
4 December 2023
- Improve the traceability of internationally traded used cars.
- Avoid hampering exports of used electric vehicles to emerging economies.
- Ensure used cars for export meet clear roadworthiness criteria, including their emissions performance.
- Develop sustainable transport strategies in emerging economies to avoid their over-dependence on cars.
Transit-Oriented Development and Accessibility: Case studies from Southeast Asian cities
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
8 October 2023
- Ensure sufficient availability of public transport and infrastructure for active modes.
- Integrate transport planning with land use planning for co-ordinated implementation of measures.
- Embrace disruptive mobility trends in ways that ensure improved accessibility.
- Collect more and better-quality data on urban mobility to underpin transit-oriented development.
- Learn from international experiences with transit-oriented development and apply them locally.
Shifting the Focus: Smaller Electric Vehicles for Sustainable Cities
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
26 September 2023
- Shift the focus of policies that promote electric vehicles to end the dependency on large, under-used vehicles.
- Help make smaller electric vehicles an attractive choice for citizens.
- Ensure the transition to smaller electric vehicles goes in hand with adequate safety provisions.
- Fast-track the electrification of shared mobility services in complement with public transport.
- Ensure the availability of enough charging points to make electric mobility attractive.
Accessibility in the Seoul Metropolitan Area: Does Transport Serve All Equally?
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
1 August 2023
- Develop people-focused policies to improve accessibility.
- Measure the impacts of policies on access and equity.
- Enable conditions for people-focused transport policies.
Making Automated Vehicles Work for Better Transport Services: Regulating for Impact
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
25 June 2023
- Recognise new legal actors and responsibilities as part of the introduction of automated transport services.
- Extend the Safe System approach to automated vehicles.
- Invest in supporting infrastructure for AV-based transport services.
- Plan a long-term pathway for the transition towards AV-based transport services.
- Co-ordinate the roles of each level of government in regulating AV-based transport services.
- Share data to ensure integrated transport services but protect passenger data against misuse.
Decarbonisation and the Pricing of Road Transport
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
20 June 2023
- Reform fuel taxes
- Supplement fuel taxes with distance-based charges
- Consider opt-in arrangements for the introduction of new distance-based charges
- Introduce congestion charges where required
- Consider earmarking congestion charging revenues for improving public transport and active mobility
- Set the level of road-user charges to meet sustainable transport objectives
- Make introducing differentiated distance-based charges a policy priority
- Reform incentives for the uptake of electric vehicles to better align with policy goals
Measuring New Mobility: Definitions, Indicators, Data Collection
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
8 May 2023
- Apply a comprehensive classification of New Mobility services and vehicles.
- Identify relevant performance indicators for New Mobility services and use them to set and monitor policy.
- Adopt a consistent reporting framework for data on New Mobility services.
Regulating App-based Mobility Services in ASEAN
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
23 April 2023
- Welcome app-based mobility but adjust regulation as necessary.
- Treat incumbents and entrants equally.
- Revise outdated and fragmented regulatory frameworks.
- Focus regulation on addressing clearly-identified market failures.
- Take the broader urban policy environment into account when designing regulations.
- Improve public authority digital skills and access to data.
- Streamline the regulatory framework for app-based mobility services.
- Monitor and enforce regulations.
- Build regulatory capacity within ASEAN member states.
The Social Impacts of Road Pricing
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
10 October 2018
- Make demand management and congestion reduction the primary objective of road pricing.
- Differentiate road pricing by location and time.
- Combine road pricing and public transport planning to improve efficiency.
- Examine the combined effects of scheme design and mitigation to understand distributional impacts.
- Consider the use of discounts and exemptions carefully.
- Develop road pricing as part of an intervention package to achieve better utilisation of urban space.
- Reconcile economic, practical and political aspects in the design of road pricing schemes.
- Differentiate charges and consider adopting a rules-based pricing approach.
The Shared-Use City: Managing the Curb
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
23 May 2018
- Establish a system of street designations according to their primary purpose.
- Anticipate and plan for the revenue impacts of shifting curb use from car parking to passenger pick up and drop off.
- Make room for ride services at the curb where this fits strategic priorities.
- Build on or create adjudication bodies to manage diverse demand for curb space in flexible ways and ultimately in real time.
- Help develop common standards for encoding information about curb use.
- Rethink streets and their curbs as flexible, self-adjusting spaces and plan accordingly.
- Manage curb space dynamically so it adapts to different uses and users.
- Establish effective tracking and monitoring of overall transport activity, including ride services.
Safer Roads with Automated Vehicles?
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
22 May 2018
- Reinforce the Safe System approach to ensure automated vehicles are used safely.
- Apply Vision Zero thinking to automated driving.
- Avoid safety performance being used to market competing automated vehicles.
- Carefully assess the safety impacts of systems that share driving tasks between humans and machines.
- Require reporting of safety-relevant data from automated vehicles.
- Develop and use a staged testing regime for automated vehicles.
- Establish comprehensive cybersecurity principles for automated driving.
- Ensure the functional isolation of safety-critical systems and that connectivity does not compromise cybersecurity or safety.
- Provide clear and targeted messaging of vehicle capabilities.
Cooperative Mobility Systems and Automated Driving
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
2 May 2018
- Shared mobility is still a relatively new field but is progressing rapidly. With business models and preferred technologies still in flux, policy makers need to prepare considered responses to these developments without delay.
- Service concepts and technology currently and on the brink of being explored need to consider a range of design domain restrictions, dependencies on infrastructure, operating principles and user interfaces.
- Specific service concepts should be matched to specific operational environments, on a detailed local level as well as across continents and cultures.
- Government action will affect how automated vehicles will impact society. Existing approaches will not be appropriate for long. Their understanding and input will help to balance the debate on whether AVs can indeed alleviate a series of stubborn problems.
Speed and Crash Risk
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
28 March 2018
- Reduce the speed on roads as well as speed differences between vehicles.
- Set speed limits according to Safe System principles.
- Improve infrastructure and enforcement if speed limits are to be increased.
- Use automatic speed control to reduce speed effectively.
Alcohol-Related Road Casualties in Official Crash Statistics
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
6 February 2018
- Review how data on alcohol-related road crashes is collected.
- Aim for a systematic alcohol testing of every road user actively involved in a serious crash.
- Use statistical analysis methods to better estimate the number of alcohol-related road fatalities.
- Harmonise definitions of alcohol-related road casualties.
- Conduct future research on how to measure alcohol-related road crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists.
Reporting on Serious Road Traffic Casualties
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
1 December 2011
- A complete picture of casualty totals from road crashes is needed to fully assess the consequences of road crashes and monitor progress.
- Injury information should complement information on fatal crashes to give a fuller picture of road crashes. Information on injuries should become more important for international comparisons.
- Police data should remain the main source for road crash statistics. However, because of underreporting problems and possible bias (for example with differing rates of reporting by vehicle type), police data should be complemented by hospital data, which are the next most useful source.
- The data from hospital emergency departments, available in some countries, should be monitored regularly and researched to determine if they might shed more light on road casualties.
- The assessment of the severity of injuries should preferably be done by medical professionals, and not by the police officer at the scene of the crash.
- Medical staff should be trained in order to systematically classify (road traffic) injuries using ICD International Classification of Diseases and to assess severities with indices such as the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) or the Maximum Abbreviated Injury (MAIS). This information -- without personal information -- should be made easily available for statistical purposes, policymaking and research.
- Besides police data and hospital data, other data sources are available. These have a limited value on their own, and cannot replace police or hospital data, but can be used to build a more balanced and comprehensive picture, to enrich the main data sources, and as a quality check.
- For linking data, the deterministic method is preferred if a unique personal identifier is available; otherwise the probabilistic method is a good alternative.
- The six assumptions needed to use the capture-recapture method must be considered carefully. Using this method combined with linking police and hospital data may be appropriate to give a fuller picture of road casualties.
- Having an internationally agreed definition of “serious” injuries will help the safety research community to better understand the consequences of road crashes and to monitor progress. Given the existing knowledge and practices, IRTAD proposes to define a ‘seriously injured road casualty’ as a person with injuries assessed at level 3 or more on the Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale i.e. "MAIS3+".