The Regional Road Safety Plan (RRSP) has been drawn by the Regional Department for Transport to achieve casualty reduction targets and improve safety on Piedmont’s roads. A set of measures have been specified and their progresses in reaching the targets will have to be regularly monitored in order to assess their effectiveness. Making the assessment procedure accessible to the wide public is a major endeavour for public accountability and commitment to the regional road safety strategy.

A number of measurements will have to be carried out to deal with the cause-impact-response steps involved in the assessment of road accidents, where:

• causes are the mix of factors which are responsible of an accident event;

• impacts are the consequences produced by an event, primarily on human health;

• responses are the measures identified by plans to remove the causes and achieve the safety targets.

The latter are those primarily concerned for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of any plan action. To carry out this assessment a number of methods already exist and have been adopted by the European Union. The following classes of indicators have been identified:

• Input indicators : they account for the set of means, such as the financial, human and organizational resources, used to implement the plan’s measures;

• Output indicators : they deal with the evaluation of the different results produced by the implementation of plan’s measures;

• Outcome indicators : they estimate the direct benefits yielded by the implementation of the plan measures on people’s safety situations in the short term, i.e. risk abatement for pedestrians, drivers and bicycle-riders;

• Impact indicators: they aim to evaluate the benefits likely to be produced by the implementation of safety measures in the long-term, i.e. reduction of the fatality rate and of the insurance and health costs.