Focus Areas and Measures to Improve Road Traffic Safety at the Local Level

Earlier approach to road traffic safety system proceeded from the assumption that the driver must adapt to the traffic system. Modern approach to road traffic safety system recognizes that traffic system must be adapted to a traffic participant: drivers, pedestrians, particularly vulnerable participants: children, elderly, persons with reduced mobility. The starting point is the acceptance of human error and vulnerability of the human body, and in accordance with that, understanding that traffic accidents cannot be completely avoided, but the death and severely injuring of traffic participants may be reduced. For this purpose, the control function of road traffic safety system promotes interventions, by whose implementation results are achieved. Road traffic safety system management, in addition to national, must take place at the local level. Although the local system of road traffic safety can be, in functional terms, set analogous to national system, its frames are much narrower and thus put much more specific and evolving demands on local road safety management for adjusting the local management system to local conditions. In this context, local traffic safety goals should focus on areas where the effect of local intervention improves traffic safety. This paper has developed the concept of traffic safety management process at the local level, encouraged by the Global Plan of the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020, which is modeled by conversion National Pillars Activities in Local Focus Areas and Measures and based on the analysis of general statistics on traffic accidents and in-depth analysis of traffic accidents with killed and seriously injured persons on local roads. With a focus on results to improve traffic safety in local communities of Montenegro, three areas are identified and twenty measures in them, whose implementation would obtain the greatest possible impact in adapting local road traffic safety system to road users, which is a precondition for improving traffic safety in the local community.