Analysis of land transportation safety in the EU with respect to safety culture

This article aims to propose a classification model for evaluating levels of countries' transportation safety culture. Analysis of statistics shows that there is a relation between rail and road accident severity in the European Union. The same patterns of rail and road safety in these countries suggest that the difference in transport safety may be related to a nation's safety culture. The contribution of this article is extend the concept of safety culture to a country's transportation using elements of organisational safety cultures. According to safety culture elements in organization, the human development index, safety index and rule of law index are proposed to be used in the model. Five-years data from 28 EU states are investigated. First, countries are clustered into three levels of safety concerning rail and road accident severity. Then, using these levels, a decision tree model was developed to classify countries' safety culture according to the proposed indexes. The model shows 0.93 accuracy; HDI and SI are chosen as the most important indicators.