Project Details

Background

India is investing substantial resources in building roads and highways. In the absence of local evidence on how road infrastructure affects safety, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are replicating safety treatments used in high-income countries (HICs). However, some of these interventions may not be effective in LMICs, or could lead to an increase in traffic injuries. There are substantial differences between the traffic environments in India and HICs. Indian roads can have higher traffic volumes and a wider range of vehicle speeds, with slow-moving auto-rickshaws sharing the road with high-performance cars. Furthermore, pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists are the most common road users in India highways. Therefore India needs to focus on protecting people outside vehicles. Yet, road design efforts to improve safety in India have primarily focused on making roads smoother, wider, and straighter, which may be beneficial to drivers because they reduce the cognitive load of driving and vehicle-to-vehicle conflicts, but detrimental to other road users because of increased vehicular speeds.

Therefore, it is important for India and other LMICs to establish long-term research programs that use local empirical data to assess how road designs affect injuries. This project aims to conduct a pilot study to build a crash database, adapt highway design evaluation methods to the Indian context, and train researchers and practitioners methods for evaluating infrastructure.  

Project Components

1. Identify research priorities for a national program to evaluate how road design affects safety

We will start by developing a national traffic injury database that will consist of  crash-level data extracted from police case files of a representative sample of districts. We will summarize the data to identify the attributes (e.g. geographic location, type of road, type of road users killed, impacting vehicle) of the most common crash scenarios on rural roads and highways. We will conduct a literature review and expert consultations to identify road-related interventions that can potentially address these crash scenarios.

2. Test a method for evaluating road designs and develop guidelines for evaluation research

We will evaluate the effect of two commonly used interventions (vertical curbs and paved shoulders) on traffic injuries using a case-control design. This will involve identifying locations of fatal crashes from police files and matched control sites, and conducting site audits to compare how often the treatments are present at these locations vs at control sites. We will use these findings and a review of best methodological practices in the HIC literature to propose guidelines for evaluating the safety of road treatments in India.  

3. Build capacity of researchers and practitioners to improve safety of road infrastructure. 

We will develop and implement a blended (online plus face-to-face) training course on highway safety evaluation for researchers and practitioners.