Forecasting Road Fatalities by the Use of Kinked Experience Curve

Abstract

The World Health Organization counts more than one million road traffic deaths every year. Many countries have established road safety targets which need to be based on reliable forecasting methods. This paper attempts to develop such forecasting models for 13 OECD countries based on the data available from 1970 to 2007. Deploying both classical and kinked experience curves, we show kinked models to fit the data better. For the two simulated forecasting periods, we find that forecasting accuracy for the kinked models is also significantly higher. Finally, we use our kinked models to forecast the road fatalities for 13 countries through 2030. All the countries will experience a considerable reduction in their fatality rates. The averaged fatality rate of 7.94 in 2010 for these 13 countries is projected to decline to 5.83 in 2020 and 4.54 in 2030.