Nguyen Tat Thanh University nominated to become partner with Asia Safe – Erasmus+

ASEAN region in South East Asia (where the 3 partner countries of this project, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam ID/MY/VN are part of) has less than 3 percent of the world’s vehicles, but it accounts for about 12 percent of the world’s road deaths. This number remains high compared to countries with much higher levels of motorization, such as the EU partner Partners: Italy, Portugal, and Sweden.

Project partners started the analysis stage during the project preparation. The initial results of the analysis with areas/problems of possible invetigations:

• Today, road accidents are the major causes of death and injuries in ID/MY/VN.

Despite considerable efforts taken to reduce the number of traffic accidents and fatalities, yet the number of fatal accidents still remain high in ID/MY/VN.

The rate of two-three wheeled vehicles in Southeast Asian countries is very high in a global context. In Vietnam 93%, Malaysia 60% and Indonesia 55%. Portugal and Italy experience also high proportion (about 20%) of motorbikes and mopeds in country, where lessons can be learnt between project partners.

Vulnerable road users (pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists) make up 50-70% of road traffic deaths in ID/MY/VN. VRUs have the high risk to be killed per distance and time travelled.

Traffic fatality rate per 100,000 population in partner countries of this project proposal is 24.7 in Vietnam, 25 for Malaysia, and 17.7 in Indonesia, comparing to only 3.2 for Sweden, 5.5 for Italy and 5.9 for Portugal. This refers to a very high traffic risk in ID/MY/VN in comparison to EU partners (3-8 times).

The majority of death and injuries on the roads are among those aged between 15 and 49 years and they are the most economically active group in ID/MY/VN.

There is lack of a good quality accessible reliable accident data where underreporting and underregistration of accidents data in the official statistics are considerable problems in ID‐MY‐VN. EU partners have a national accident databases. One good practice is STRADA (Swedish Traffic Accidents National Database) where it integrates accidents data from traffic police, hospitals and insurance companies.

Vehicle and road standards are a critical part of road safety in ID/MY/VN from engineering point of view.

Road user behaviour and attitudes play a key role in accidents in ID/MY/VN.

Rapid rate of urbanization and motorisation with lack of infrastructure development.

Application of IT in Traffic Safety operation and management is important sector to be investigatd.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Jakarta city in Indonesia is a good practice to learn from.

There is a need of advanced curricula and effective research at universities in ID/MY/VN in the subject road Traffic Safety. At postgraduate level, MSc students in civil/transportation engineering learn little about Traffic Safety and mostly from traffic engineering or road design. Besides, if the Traffic Safety curricula exists, it is not upgraded.