General Information

Publication year: 2017

Publication place: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Language: English

Publishers:​ Erasmus University Rotterdam

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Summary

Prishtina is the capital city of Kosovo, the youngest country in Europe, who declared its independence in 2008. Before its independence, Kosovo is an autonomous province under Serbia, which was part of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Kosovo has a long history of conflicts since the occupation of Turkish Ottoman Empire in Balkan Peninsula area until the recent one was the Kosova War in 1998 – 1999. As a post-conflict society, Prishtina is suffering from several urban challenges. One of these challenges is road safety issue indicated by increasing the number of traffic accidents in Prishtina and even nationwide. National government considered this situation as unusual for European countries.

 

This study aimed to answer a research question on how the road safety is perceived from two main perspectives, which are road users (pedestrians and cyclists) and stakeholders in the producer’s level of road safety strategy in Prishtina. This study was conducted in urban zone of Prishtina, which is also the case study, with the regards to the increasing number of traffic accidents, which involve pedestrians and cyclists, as the vulnerable road users. Moreover, this research is driven from the importance of taking road users’ perspective, especially their everyday experiences, into account in planning, designing, and implementing a road safety strategy towards the effort to reduce the number of traffic accidents in Prishtina and in Kosovo in general. Road users’ everyday experiences are important to acknowledge in order to get a comprehensive understanding of what actually happened on the ground in term of road safety issues. This perspective, even tough is important, is often neglected by stakeholders in producer’s level, especially in the context of post-conflict society, like Kosovo, where a strategy appear to be an utopia because it does not touch the real problem.

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