Road Safety Knowledge Development and Dissemination

It is well known that the road accident has been a major problem in Thailand for many years. Every year around 14,000 people embers death and Thai economics sustains a loss of more than 100,000 million Baht only due to road accident and its consequences. In 1998, bolstered by the World Bank loan assistance, the Ministry of Transport developed a comprehensive road safety master plan which vividly identified that the lack of knowledge about road accidents is one of the major constrains for road safety improvement in Thailand. The establishment of Thailand Accident Research Center (TARC) in 2003 was therefore one of the recommendations and finally an outcome of this master plan.

The main achievement of TARC during its first three years was to develop the methodology and knowledge for in-depth accident investigation and reconstruction. Other than that, TARC has been successful in creating substantial interests among various stakeholders and academicians to join hands in road accident prevention and mitigation which can be realized by several on-going road safety research projects being conducted by various organizations including government, non-government organizations, and academic institutes at present. As the outcome of in-depth accident investigation and reconstruction, TARC has identified five types of crashes encapsulating most of the accident cases in Thailand and requiring further in-depth study to determine the countervailing measures. They are: motorcycle accidents, alcohol impaired drivers, rollover crashes, behavior of young drivers and crashes with road side hazards.

The main objective of this research is to build on the success of the first 3 year activities and further develop, utilize, and disseminate the knowledge to address the road safety problems in Thailand.  The outcome of this extended phase enabled TARC to become a sustainable center of research excellence in road safety with adequate resources to continue a high quality and useful research program in the future. 

This research project has a detailed explanation regarding how TARC plans to address these issues within next two years as part of the two year extension of the project. The focus has mainly been given on: further in-depth accident investigation and reconstruction studies on focus areas; consolidation and publication of scientific information and statistical analysis through TARC website; knowledge dissemination through postgraduate studies, hiring and training new researchers, short term training, conferences, seminars and brain-storming discussions; creation of awareness through public relation activities and setup an online training and networking tool to share knowledge and experiences to improve the road safety knowledge of individuals and participants of multifarious organizations in mass scale.