Enforcement of traffic rules and regulations forms an important component of strategies to reduce deaths and injuries due to road traffic crashes. As with many other issues concerning road safety policy, it is not always clear whether common sense approaches in police enforcement actually reduce injuries and fatalities on the road. It is therefore important to assess whether a given enforcement measure, though seemingly beneficial in its intent, actually results in any reduction of delinquent behaviour of drivers and number of crashes. In this article, we assess the evidence base of effectiveness of on-road enforcement measures by conducting a review of systematic reviews on this topic. In this review, we focused only on the objective police programmes or strategies and excluded the reviews which assessed the effectiveness of a traffic enforcement law. We answer the following questions in this review: (a) what is the theoretical basis of different enforcement measures? (b) What are the different road safety enforcement measures for which evidence is available in systematic reviews and how current is this evidence? (c) What are the different limitations or drawbacks of different studies as reported by the systematic reviews and what are their implications on results? (d) What are the different factors which limit the generalisations of available evidence across different settings or across different types of modes? Our review suggests that: (i) legislation and enforcement are effective when violations are visible and easy to detect. (ii) Strict punishment not as effective as subjective perception of being caught violating a law. (iii) There is an absence of studies that could provide guidelines on police enforcement for low and middle-income countries on the following issues: (a) influence of road and infrastructure design on traffic violations and the difficulties of enforcement when designs are not adequate for the kind and volume of road users present; (b) critical/minimum levels of enforcement necessary for different traffic violations; (c) enforcement methods that would be cost effective in situations with high proportion of motorcycles and other vulnerable road users.
What and How of Effective Police Enforcement
Springer Transactions in Civil and Environmental Engineering
2021-05-20
19 pages
Aufsatz/Kapitel (Buch)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
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