Estimating the Relative Efficiency of Highway Safety Investments on Commercial Transportation

Highway safety has been one of the most important public policy issues discussed in recent years. Accidents involving commercial vehicles result in many negative effects, both personal and economic. Although the numbers of highway accidents have been declining in the past decade, many people still suffer from the effects of severe highway accidents. As public policymakers struggle to improve safety on our highway system, they are looking for analytical tools to help them assess and leverage the impact of scarce public resources. This research effort used data envelopment analysis (DEA) for benchmarking the efficiency of public policy factors (regulatory and financial) known to have an influence on safety performance. The results of this research can provide objective safety performance and improvement recommendations for commercial transportation and therefore serve to be instructive to those states with lower levels of safety performance. Our findings suggest that government agencies could focus on more effective policymaking (emphasizing road condition improvement and capital outlay utilization vs. other investments) to reduce highway fatality rates.