چكيده به لاتين
Currently, evaluating and comparing road safety performance of countries, states, provinces, etc are considered as essential tools for better understanding road safety situation of each unit and identifying best unit as a reference in terms of action programs and policies for road safety improvements. In the most traditional approaches, these comparisons just focus on road safety final outcomes (i.e. the absolute number of road accidents, injuries and fatalities), with the purpose of unit ranking. But in recent years, researchers have been trying to reduce various aspects of road safety into a composite index to perform more realistic comparisons. In this study, a composite safety performance index is structured to conduct the traffic safety evaluation process and comparison among fourteen elected metropolises in Iran from an overall perspective. This index contains several effective indicators on traffic safety in order to reach a more realistic judgment. In addition to the number of accidents, exposure indicators, facilities and resources of each metropolis in the field of traffic safety, are considered in the structure and general framework of the composite index. In this regard, nine indicators were chosen according to the metropolitan scale and the weight of each indicator was determined by the combination of analytic hierarchy process and Shannon entropy method. Then, two different multiple criteria decision making methods (i.e Promethee and Topsis method) were used to aggregate the indicators into a composite index and the Copland method was used to integrate the ranks determined by these two methods. The ranking of metropolises was calculated with both the traditional approach and the CI-based approach proposed in this study.The final ranking based on composite index indicates that Zahendan, Kashan and Zanjan had the best and Mashhad, Urmia and Isfahan had the worst traffic safety situation among the elected metropolises. However the results based on the traditional approach are significantly different. Such a significant difference implies that the exposure and resource indicators might be regarded as an important dimension of road safety performance.
