title: The influence of economic incentives linked to road safety indicators on accidents: the case of toll concessions in Spain.
abstract: The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the incentives incorporated in toll highway concession contracts in order to encourage private operators to adopt measures to reduce accidents are actually effective at improving safety. To this end, we implemented negative binomial regression models using information about highway characteristics and accident data from toll highway concessions in Spain from 2007 to 2009. Our results show that even though road safety is highly influenced by variables that are not managed by the contractor, such as the annual average daily traffic (AADT), the percentage of heavy vehicles on the highway, number of lanes, number of intersections and average speed; the implementation of these incentives has a positive influence on the reduction of accidents and injuries. Consequently, this measure seems to be an effective way of improving safety performance in road networks.
authors: Transport Research Center (TRANSyT), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. Electronic address: trangel@caminos.upm.es.
authors: Thais
authors: T
authors: Rangel
authors: José Manuel
authors: JM
authors: Vassallo
authors: Israel
authors: I
authors: Herraiz
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000401:mortality / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004779:Environment Design / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009042:Motivation; D055818:Public-Private Sector Partnerships / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012449:Safety; D013030:Spain
keywords: Concession contract; Incentives; Interurban toll highway; Negative binomial regression; Performance-based indicators; Road accident; Road safety incentives