IROSWEP: A National Web Portal for Providing and Sharing Domestic Road Safety Information

Encountering a drastic increase in the volume of urban and rural road traffic, the country has suffered many injuries and fatalities in road traffic accidents in recent years. This issue became more serious when lack of inter-organizational alignment between perspectives, and moreover, absence of a comprehensive well-organized road safety database intensifies the indirect causes contributing to road traffic accidents. In this regard, one of the first steps in coping with the road accidents in a developing country like Iran may be to create a comprehensive database of road safety information. According to this primary and basic need, it seems essential to construct a national road safety web portal required by professionals, experts, road users, practitioners, and academics dealing with road safety issues. In line with this idea, the project entitled Comprehensive Road Safety Information Database was funded by Iranian Road Maintenance and Transport Organization in January 2011 and the Applied Road Safety Research Center of Iran University ofScience and Technology was commissioned to implement this project. As a result of the findings of this project, this paper wants to report the final outcomes of major experiences of setting up the Iranian Road Safety Web Portal (IROSWEP). This paper attempts to spotlight the arguments, suggestions, experienced obstacles, and lessons learned during this indispensable national project. In this paper, not only is the summary of achievements of the project provided, but also the untold points learned during the project, which can be helpful for practitioners, are distinguished.

Keywords:

Web portal , Road safety , Database , Road accidents