Road safety resource allocation using the cost-effectiveness approach; case study in Iran

Road safety resource allocation determines the extent to which the combined alternatives of remedial actions can be effective. In this study, an economic appraisal was fulfilled using a cost-effectiveness analysis approach considering the cost of implementing countermeasures and the reliable number of crash reductions. This study includes a case study to investigate the cost-effectiveness analysis approach to allocate resources in high-risk areas and to investigate the possibility of substituting this approach for cost–benefit analysis if no data regarding crash costs are available. Since both approaches have yielded similar results across a range of budgets, cost-effectiveness analysis can be substituted for cost–benefit analysis because, despite having several advantages, cost–benefit analysis needs to estimate the social and economic costs of crashes. In addition, the cost–benefit analysis approach considers crashes resulting in fatalities and crashes causing injury separately, and because the net benefit from reducing fatal crashes is far greater than for injury crashes, owing to the high costs of fatal crashes, this approach proposes more expensive countermeasures. It was shown that a cost-effectiveness analysis distributes the available limited budget almost equally across all sites and chooses cheaper measures. In this study, a reliable relationship is suggested in order to estimate the number of crash reductions considering all aspects.