12.2 The Importance of Monitoring, analysing and Evaluating

With limited budgets, it is very important to demonstrate that road safety interventions are effective, and of value. This is particularly important in LMICs where comprehensive action plans have been developed fairly recently with limited funds from central governments and aid agencies. Good information is required on the effectiveness of interventions to ensure that limited available funding is spent in the most effective way. There is currently a large gap in our understanding of how different interventions improve safety in LMICs. Intervention Effectiveness in LMICs in Intervention Options and Selection highlights some of the difficulties in using information from HICs on treatment effectiveness in LMICs. An evidence-based approach is required to improve knowledge on effectiveness of interventions in LMICs, and this can only occur through monitoring and evaluation of interventions in these countries.

Even worse than the inefficient use of limited funding is the possible use of interventions that lead to an increase in crash risk. Unfortunately, this situation does occur in public policy decision making, including those regarding road safety, often as the result of poor information, as a result of behavioural adaptation from road users, or from a poor implementation process. It may also occur due to trade-offs in decision making, whereby safety considerations are not given as high a priority as other issues (such as mobility).

One example that illustrates how a ‘safety’ intervention can produce an increase in risk comes from driver education programmes. Although it may seem unlikely that increased driver training and education would have either no effect or even moderately increase crash risk, this is exactly what has been found. Various studies exist on driver education program. From these studies driver education program may not always have a clear positive effect. These examples indicate the importance of having information on effectiveness before spending limited resources. (Helman et al., 2010, cited in McKenna, 2010; and Williams, 2006, cited in McKenna, 2010).

Monitoring, analysis and evaluation is an important component of infrastructure safety management, it need not be undertaken to the same extent for each project. For example, if a safety intervention is implemented in a particular locality that has already been thoroughly evaluated and deemed beneficial then the requirement for further evaluation may be more limited.  Safety treatments that have had little or no use in the locality will need to follow a more thorough evaluation process.