Problematic issues of scientific and methodological provision of road safety audit

Abstract

The problem of high accident rates on the road transport of Ukraine in the context of the dynamic development of logistics and transport processes cannot be solved without the wide implementation of road safety audit, as it helps to improve the safety of transport processes, reduce social and economic losses from road accidents, and integrate Ukraine into the European and world transport space. The analysis of the relationship between the components of the road safety audit shows that the formation of ways of its improvement is impossible without an assessment of the functioning of the driver – car – road – environment system, in which the movement of vehicles takes place, their interaction with other road users under the influence of environmental factors. At the same time, the strategic priority issues of the road safety audit are the safety of vulnerable road users, providing drivers with information about traffic conditions, safety in specific traffic conditions, and minimizing the severity of the consequences of road accidents.

In the article, based on the analysis of the problematic issues of scientific and methodological support of road safety audit, the limitations of traditional approaches and empirical modeling methods used to ensure the quality and reliability of the audit were revealed, as they are based on the assumption of independence of input variables. To remove these restrictions and develop measures to improve audit procedures and increase road safety, it is proposed to take into account the mutual influence of factors and, based on their ranking, the use of methods of fuzzy logic, catastrophe theory, and cognitive sciences to model multifactorial dependencies.

Key words: transport systems, road transport, road safety, audit, accident rate analysis, examination of road accidents.