| The European Union
has set in the White paper on transport policy an ambitious goal
of halving the number of traffic fatalities over the period of 2000
- 2010 (European Commission, 2001). The goal was confirmed in 2003
in the Road Safety Action Programme (European Commission, 2003).
The White Paper identifies a number of principal lines of activity
for achieving the target including:
- harmonisation of penalties and
- promotion of new technologies to improve road safety.
Traffic enforcement and its mechanism have figured as a subject
of research since the late 1940's. Then, the objective of traffic
enforcement was “to implant a feeling of ever-present surveillance
by highway patrols” (Irby & Jacobs, 1960), the essential
term being “the feeling of presence” rather than the
actual presence of the police. The subjective factor, “feeling”
in the concept of deterrence, was probably first introduced explicitly
as subjective risk of detection in the mid 1960s by Brehmer (1966).
Enforcement even today is leaning largely on the conception of deterrence,
even though the view of deterrence and methods to maintain it have
evolved during the past decades.
Over the years, a lot of useful information and
knowledge has accumulated for developing effective enforcement strategies
and tactics. The partners, representing all major traffic safety
research institutes in Europe have participated in a number of scientific
projects contributing to a common enforcement knowledge base.
In many of the European transport safety policies,
there are a safety targets expressed in quantitative terms. Also,
included are a number of possible measures in order to meet the
targets. PEPPER work identifies these needs by providing decision
makers with:
- tools to implement conventional and innovative safety measures
in the field of enforcement,
- ways of prioritising different enforcement methods and safety
measures, and
- a proposal and a conceptual model to assess the deployment
and impacts of enforcement on a European level also the adoption
of Commission Recommendation on Enforcement in the Field of
Road Safety.
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