Webinar on Establishing Modern Crash Database Systems

It is estimated that 80% of road crash deaths are missing from official statistics in low-income countries, which limits their capacity to monitor road safety trends, provide effective road safety governance, and advocate for improvements. While many jurisdictions have adopted or developed proprietary systems for recording crash data, they are often developed in isolation and owned and maintained by traffic police. This means that analytical usage is often limited to law enforcement, without suitably addressing road safety risk and management issues as would be expected of a robust crash database system.

In addition to modernizing crash database systems, there must be parallel efforts to: a) improve capacity and training for reliable data collection, b) ensure adequate resources, especially in rural areas, and c) foster an inter-governmental commitment to share information with, and analyze data from, the aggregated crash database system. Though there are many challenges in upgrading national crash database systems, some developing countries have shown promising results.

This GRSF webinar showcased country experiences modernizing crash database systems from the Philippines, Georgia, India, and Colombia, and highlighted the inter-governmental effort required to develop such systems and ensure effective utilization by all stakeholders.