Investigating safety of vulnerable road users in selected EU countries Piotr Olszewski, a, ⁎ Piotr Szagała, a Daniel Rabczenko, b Anna Zielińska c a Faculty of Civil Engineering, Warsaw University of Technology, ul. Lecha Kaczynskiego 16, Warsaw, Poland b National Institute of Public Health, ul. Chocimska 24, 00-791 Warsaw, Poland c Motor Transport Institute, ul. Jagiellonska 80, 03-301 Warsaw, Poland abstract article info Article history: Received 10 June 2018 Received in revised form 4 September 2018 Accepted 4 December 2018 Available online 14 December 2018 Problem: Vulnerable road users comprise over half of all road accident victims in the EU and their safety situation is not improving as fast as for motorists. The paper examines factors affecting fatality risk of pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, and moped riders in seven EU countries using data from CARE database. Method: Comparing acci- dent severity indicators between countries is problematic because of data quality issues, different degree of underreporting, and different exposure levels. To avoid bias arising from these issues, fatality risk is modeled with binary logistic regression. Risk factors considered include accident location by area type, junction type, and traffic control, as well as lighting condition. Results are presented as odds ratios of fatal accident outcome in different countries under specific circumstances compared to reference conditions. It is shown that the error in OR values due to underreporting is small. Results and discussion: Wide confidence intervals of the odds ratios in some countries confirm problems with accident data quality. Fatality risk is always higher for non-urban ver- sus urban area and for darkness versus daylight conditions, but the odds ratios are different for different coun- tries. Inconsistent results are obtained for accident location with respect to junction and its control type. Possible reasons for these differences are suggested and discussed. Practical applications: The proposed method avoids the data quality bias of accident severity indicators, thus, it can be used in international comparisons of vulnerable road user accidents. The article findings also support the concept of changes in legislation, such as re- ducing the speed limit in urban areas in Poland at night. Generally, the experience of countries with low VRU fa- tality risk identified in the article can be transferred to those with a higher risk. © 2018 National Safety Council and Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Road safety Vulnerable road users Accident data Fatality risk Logistic regression 1. Introduction Based on the traffic accident statistics, in the whole European Union (EU) vulnerable road users (VRU) constitute 46% of all traffic fatalities and 53% of all seriously injured accident victims. Vulnerable road users include pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, and moped riders. Gravity of the VRU safety situation has been recognized by international bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union and is reflected in their traffic safety programs and campaigns (European Commission, 2010; World Health Organization, 2010). The study reported here is focused on seven EU countries taking part in research project InDeV: “In-Depth understanding of accident causa- tion for Vulnerable road users” which is carried out under the Horizon 2020 Programme (Project InDeV website, 2018). These countries are: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Swe- den. The seriousness of the problem is evidenced by the fact that in those seven countries during five-year period (2009–2013) there were over 1.24 million VRU victims of road accidents (CARE database website, 2018). While the general traffic safety situation has been im- proving in recent years, in some countries we see an increase in the VRU share of all accidents and even in the absolute numbers of these accidents. The objective of the study task reported here was to identify road in- frastructure-related conditions and factors that have a negative impact on VRU traffic safety. Analyses of accidents suffered by pedestrians, cy- clists, as well as riders and passengers of mopeds and motorcycles were carried out in order to determine the largest problems with their safety and to identify locations and situations where these types of accidents are most likely to occur. It is hoped that lessons learned in low acci- dent-risk countries can be transferred to countries where this risk for vulnerable road users is still high. The paper is organized as follows: part 2 shows the background on prior research into vulnerable road user safety and part 3 presents sta- tistics on safety situation of VRUs in Europe. Part 4 presents the method- ology adopted in this study, part 5 reports on the results of fatality risk Journal of Safety Research 68 (2019) 49–57 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: p.olszewski@il.pw.edu.pl (P. Olszewski). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2018.12.001 0022-4375/© 2018 National Safety Council and Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Safety Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsr