Investigating the road safety management capacity: Toward a lead agency reform

An efficient management system and leadership body is one of the key requirements for a road safety improvement program. In low- and middle-income countries, the organizational structure of the management system may suffer from deficiencies weakening the institutional functions across key road safety players. Hence, it is necessary to form an inner- and inter-organization evaluation framework encompassing all the processes, events, dependencies, and causation among road safety players. In this paper, a (three-stage) system thinking approach is developed to evaluate the behavior of inter-organizational complex system and to determine major deficiencies in the role of the road safety lead agency. The first stages of the system thinking approach starts with drawing diagrams (i.e. multiple-effect and multiple-criteria trees) that allows identifying the chains of reasoning behind events or consequences. The next stage of the system thinking approach embodies the analytic network process (ANP), an advanced multi-criteria decision-making technique, which handles the lead agency capacity evaluation and helps to determine how and by what magnitude any of the players can affect the national road safety. The proposed method applies to the case of Iran, a middle-income developing country in the Middle East. Since in Iran, the Road Safety Commission (RSC) has been established as the lead agency, it was expected that RSC owns the greatest influence on the status of road safety. However, our results show that the overall influence of RSC on road safety is far less than what was expected. Subsequently, a supplementary procedure is proposed to specify institutional reforms in order to avoid such organizational inefficiencies.