About road safety policy Going on with the research and choosing or setting up a global model with a sufficient number of variables to represent all the traffic conditions. Co-ordinating Road Safety Policies of the different countries and assist developing countries. About 60 per cent of road facilities in OECD Member countries occur on rural roads. This represents about 75000 people who are killed each year. The economic cost of this level of road trauma is around USD 120 billion.
Personal injuries are likely to be equally high in their number and cost.
Since 1970, there has been a dramatic increase in the importance of the rural road safety problem relative to urban and motorway fatalities. The risk of dying from a rural road crash is high. This relates to the remote locations of many crashes, and the time required for emergency care to be on site. One difficulty is that of determining the exact location of the crash. Australia provided the only case of a targeted Rural Road Safety Action Plan with specific measures to address the problem.