Impact of Safer Roads on Community Health and Economic Growth

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Generally, a model for safe transportation and economic development can be summarized as: Providing Infrastructure → Improving (Physical) Accessibility →. Enhancing Mobility → Improving Welfare

2.0 RESEARCH METHOLOGY

Since an important aim of the study is to analyze the impact of safer roads on the community health and the economy development; accident data has an important role in the investigation. Beyond the absolute numbers the yearly changes of the total numbers of accidents can help us to explain impact of safe roads on the economy based on social and economic processes. Accordingly world accident data is analyzed during the research with regard to the total number of accidents in countries like Hungary in the past twelve years. Accident data in the past twelve years had a slow decreasing tendency. The biggest reduction took place from 2008 to 2010 after 2010 the reduction started to lower which in turn led the good community health and economic development around many countries.

The current road safety situation and the economic development has been evaluated based on the application of the Kopits-Cropperb method. This method is originated in a linear regression log-log model, where both the dependent variable and independent variables are log-transformed variables.

To describe the relationship among Gross Domestic Production(GDP) and the average age of the vehicle fleet a simple regression model has been built up during the research. The linear regression model is based on a linear predictor function, which estimates average age of the vehicle fleet as unknown model parameters from GDP data, as the explanatory variable.

Following the analysis of the current situation, an international comparison has been carried out based on the Trinca model, which combines in itself both mortality rate (killed/106 population) and fatality rate (killed/104 vehicles), especially considering that it can be misleading, if only the mortality rate is used. Mortality rate in itself is not suitable for independent, objective comparison, because its value can be low not only in the case of high-level road safety, but in the case of low motorization level as well.

The objective of next methodological step is to comprehensively explore the extent to which the EU countries have improved their road safety performance over the period of 2001–2010. In doing so, the result of data envelopment analysis (Yongjun Shen et al., 2013) is introduced, which is a linear programming based technique for measuring the relative performance of organizational units where the presence of multiple inputs and outputs makes the comparisons difficult. In the field of road safety the outputs (e.g. the number of road fatalities) have to be minimized with respect to the level of exposure. Hence in this case the frontier decision making units of the data envelopment analysis are the road safety best-performing countries with minimum output levels.

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The study also aiming to compare the most significant transport safety factors dependent on economic development (Beenstock & Gafni, 2000), distinguished national and international trends. It analyses how international transport safety trends, like the improvement of vehicle safety, and local efforts, like increasing the presence of the police force, improving road traffic behaviour or road network safety influence the long term accident trends, therefore, improving the community health and economy.

3.0 DISCUSSION

3.1 Economics of Low Volume (Rural) Road Development:

Rural road investment is one of the main priorities of Governments in every country around the world as a mechanism towards reducing poverty. Various studies have provided evidence that poverty is also more pervasive in “unconnected” areas that are areas with no or unreliable (motorised) access. So, Poverty is very often far worse in rural areas than in urban centers, as a result of lack of integration with urban centers due to lack of adequate accessibility and mobility, and local roads and tracks are often impassable, thereby proving it very difficult and in some cases nearly impossible for rural families to have access to the local rural economy. Rural roads have only relatively recently received attention in development research. However, It is also an important aspect considered by the development community in the poverty alleviation process and the provision of more equitable opportunities for rural citizens.

Parallel work [World Bank 2001] indicated that a significant improvement in socio economic living conditions was estimated with rural roads investment. The estimated benefits included the following:

• improved accessibility to social infrastructure [schools and health centers], increased opportunities to access education and health facilities and improved social interaction and mobility, which are important for social and economic development;

• improved access to markets by reducing transport costs;

•improvement of the marketability of pe rishable goods through timely and cheaper transport that will provide a direct incen tive for more market-oriented agriculture, with more profitable cash crops, an increase in rural income and also additional employment opportunities (COETZER, 2006).

Economic Growth From the afore-mentioned it is evident that economic growth and development in any country can be linked to the road network of a country as transport improvements stimulate economic development. The existence of an adequate and efficient road infrastructure network is crucial and a prerequisite for the provision of accessibility and mobility to the citizens of a country. Rural roads infrastructure is essential and a pre-requisite for economic growth and development for the country.

3.2 Development of Strategic Transport Corridors

Corridor development is one of the more interesting and complex issues in transportation planning. A transport corridor is a generally linear area that is defined by one or more modes of transportation like highways, railroads or public transit which share a common course. In addition, it can define as define a transportation corridor as a geographic area between two points, linking multiple centers, and moving people and freight. Development often occurs around transportation corridors because they carry so many people, creating linear agglomerations like the Las Vegas Strip or the linear form of many neighborhood retail areas.

Building a transport corridor