IMPACT OF THE NUMBER OF VEHICLES ON TRAFFIC SAFETY: MULTIPHASE MODELING

Traffic safety is one of the key issues nowadays, given the fact that a large number of people lose their lives in traffic accidents every day. There are various influential factors in the occurrence of traffic accidents, the number of vehicles being one of them. This paper assesses the traffic safety in Montenegro in the period 1998-2020 by applying the multiphase modeling with a purpose to obtain comparative results which enable implementation of adequate strategies. A total of six scenarios were formed with two inputs and two outputs in a DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model, with the number of registered vehicles per year being an input in all scenarios. In addition, as inputs, the scenarios included AADT (Annual Average Daily Traffic), passengers in road transport, passenger-km by road transport, goods transported by road, tone-km by road, and passengers in local transport. The number of traffic accidents with casualties, the number of traffic accidents with material damage, the number of fatal cases and the number of injured persons, depending on a scenario, were observed as outputs. After the DEA model, IMF SWARA (Improved Fuzzy Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) was applied to determine the weights of inputs and outputs, while the final state of traffic safety by years was determined using the MARCOS (Measurement of alternatives and ranking according to COmpromise solution) method.