Publications

Road safety is a major public health issue in Cambodia. Reducing the number of road crashes is a priority for the government. Accurate data are needed to design the most effective interventions. Improving the current crash data system will furnish a more comprehensive picture of critical road safety issues in Cambodia and provide the basis for developing policies to save more lives.

In the framework of the development of the Asia Pacific Road Safety Observatory (APRSO), the World Bank and the International Transport Forum (ITF), with the support of the Cambodian Government, initiated a project aimed at assessing the crash data system in Cambodia and developing a road map for strengthening this system.

This project follows up on a previous twinning project between Cambodia and the Netherlands, undertaken in the framework of the International Road Traffic and Accident Database (IRTAD) group of ITF in 2010-2014. That project concerned both a review of the Road Crash and Victim Information System (RCVIS), and training and support to develop a national road safety strategy and related indicators.

The current project started in 2019 and was carried out by the World Bank and the ITF, with support from the Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) and UK AID. The Dutch Road Safety Research Institute, SWOV, was contracted by the ITF to lead the review.

This report provides conclusions and recommendations on the basis of the data review mission undertaken in December 2019.

If you are reading this, you probably already know that 1.3 million people are killed on the world’s roads each year and another 20-50 million are seriously injured – 90 percent of these tragedies occur in developing countries. Having such figures help us understand the gravity of the epidemic we are facing; however, when we look at most low- and middle-income countries’ road crash data, the official numbers often do not match up with the reality of their roads.

Many road crashes go un-reported, certain incidents – such as those involving cyclists or property damage-only – are under-reported, and in a vast number of records, the data are incomplete (lacking even the location of the crash). Being able to efficiently and accurately collect, analyze, and report road crash data, is the first step to tackle this problem, and this is where DRIVER comes into play.

Developed by the World Bank in 2013, the Data for Road Incident Visualization, Evaluation, and Reporting (DRIVER) system, is a free web-based, open-source platform that improves the collection, management, analysis, and reporting of road crash data by enabling multiple agencies such as the police, health care providers, and local/national government agencies, to geo-reference road incidents in the same database in real time. It was first piloted in two Philippine cities, Cebu and Manila and since then, the GRSF has supported the improvement and deployment of DRIVER through workshops, pilot projects, implementation support and scaleup in countries such as Brazil, Bangladesh, India, Kazakhstan, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia.