Assessing Road Safety Performance by Data Envelopment Analysis - The Case of Brazil

The intense economic growth experienced by Brazil in recent decades and its consequent explosive motorization process have generated an undesirable impact: the increasing and unbroken trend in road traffic fatalities. In order to contribute to road safety diagnosis, this study presents a research on two main available indicators in Brazil: mortality rate (represented by fatalities per inhabitants); and fatality rate (represented by two sub-indicators, i.e., fatalities per vehicle and fatalities per vehicle kilometers traveled). These indicators were aggregated into a composite indicator (CI) through a multiple layer data envelopment analysis CI model (ML DEA-CI), in which the optimum combination of indicators’ weights is searched for each decision-making unit (DMU), in this case, the 27 Brazilian states (BR-27). The composite indicator represents the road safety performance on which a ranking of states can be made. As a result, valuable differences associated to DMU’s socioeconomic attributes were outlined after calibrating the model.