Analysis of the Effect of Traffic Safety Investment on Traffic Accident Reduction Using Panel Data

There are many investment budget drafts in the filed of a road traffic safety. The traffic safety budget is spitted into following three major areas: 1) traffic safety facility (Engineering), 2) traffic enforcement (Enforcement), and 3) traffic safety education & public relation (Education). The three area are known as so-called 3E policy. This study investigates the effect of the investment in the 3E policy on the reduction of traffic accidents analyzing the data annually collected from the 15 local governments during 1992 to 2007. The analysis employing the traffic accidents as the dependent variable reveals that the effect of the investment is higher if same amount of investment is made on areas of the traffic safety education and public relation than the area of facility improvement. The similar conclusions are resulted from the separate investigation of traffic accidents data by 6 different types. All the results consistently indicate that the current traffic safety investment being primarily made on traffic safety facility needs to shift to the areas of traffic safety education and public relation budget.