Road safety in Austria is the joint responsibility of various different policy and decision makers (local authorities, political stakeholders, research institutes, non-governmental organisations). The chart below provides an overview of the different participants and how they work together. The Road Safety Programme (RSP) forms the core of the country’s road safety work. The first RSP was enacted in 2002 for the period from 2002 to 2010. The current RSP 2011-2020 was published in February 2011. As a result of the Accident Investigation Act (Unfalluntersuchungsgesetz) which came into force in 2006, bmvit established a Road Safety Advisory Council as the forum for decision-makers in matters relating to road safety. The Road Safety Advisory Council focuses, in particular, on the preparation, ongoing evaluation and development of road safety programmes for all modes of transport. Its members are made up of the transport spokespersons for the parliamentary political parties, safety experts for all modes of transport and representatives of government ministries, local and regional authorities, automobile clubs, chambers of commerce and industry, trade and labour associations, interest groups and research institutions. The Advisory Council’s “Roads Task Force” was actively involved in the preparation of the RSP 2011-2020, will support the programme throughout its duration and will evaluate it at regular intervals. This annual report provides an overview of the implementation status of the RSP and thus serves as an ongoing programme evaluation tool. The Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit) has published an Annual Report on “Road Safety in Austria” since 2007. This report offers an annual overview of road safety work in Austria and provides information on current trends in accident statistics. The Road Safety Programme 2011-20201 (RSP) was published in 2011. This 2014 edition of the Annual Report on Road Safety in Austria reports on the implementation of the measures contained in the RSP’s individual areas of intervention and outlines the resulting successes in reducing the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities on Austria’s roads. The Annual Report supports those who are involved in road safety work — researchers, practitioners and decision makers — in the development, planning and implementation of further road safety measures. This, in turn, also establishes the basis for achieving the ambitious goals set in the Road Safety Programme for the period to 2020 — and allows any necessary adaptations to the programme to be made in a timely manner. All analyses should factor in the changes to accident data collection procedures that came into effect as of 2012. Since 1 January 2012, personal injury accidents on Austria’s roads have been recorded electronically by the police officers who respond to a road traffic accident via an “Accident Data Management” (ADM) system and transmitted directly to Statistics Austria (Bundesanstalt Statistik Österreich). While the actual accidents are recorded on the spot, i.e. as soon as possible after they occur, the full details of an incident may subsequently be entered into the system in stages. A major change is that all accidents are now assigned spatial coordinates using a geographic information system (GIS), a development which will significantly aid the identification of high accident concentration sections of the road network in future. The accident data collection catalogue has been updated in line with road safety and accident research requirements and considerably extended in comparison to the data previously collected via the accident statistics report. (Author/publisher)
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