From Vision Zero to Action: Introducing SOTERIA’s Safe City Certification

Cities across Europe have embraced Vision Zero, committing to eliminate road fatalities and serious injuries. Yet translating this ambition into concrete, measurable, and comparable action remains a challenge — particularly in complex urban environments where safety depends not only on infrastructure, but also on behaviour, perception, and data governance.

Within the SOTERIA project, we addressed this gap by developing the Safe City Certification: a structured, data‑driven approach that helps cities assess, compare, and continuously improve urban road safety, with a strong focus on Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and micro‑mobility users.

Why Safe City Certification?

Urban safety is often assessed through isolated indicators — accident numbers, speed limits, or infrastructure provision. While useful, these metrics alone do not capture the multidimensional nature of safety. A street may appear “safe” statistically, yet still feel unsafe to pedestrians, cyclists, or older users.

The Safe City Certification responds to this challenge by combining objective data (e.g. accident statistics, traffic density, infrastructure quality) with subjective and social dimensions, such as perceived safety and accessibility. Rather than ranking or labelling cities, the certification is designed as a supportive tool that helps identify risks early and guide targeted interventions — while avoiding simplistic or stigmatising comparisons.

The Safe City Certification builds on the broader Vision Zero philosophy and draws conceptual inspiration from existing initiatives such as DEKRA’s Vision Zero Map, while extending these approaches through a multidimensional, data‑driven and improvement‑oriented framework developed within SOTERIA.

A multidimensional, data‑driven approach

The Safe City Certification is built around four complementary dimensions of urban safety:

• Physical, covering infrastructure, accidents, speed, road design
• Digital, based on the availability and use of safety‑relevant data and analytics
• Social, pertaining to inclusiveness, accessibility, perception of safety, and
• Systemic, including governance, policies, long‑term safety planning.

The methodology integrates multiple data sources through the Safe Mobility Data Space (SMDS) and advanced analytics, including AI‑based risk prediction and explainable models. Indicators are aggregated through a transparent scoring logic, enabling comparability across neighbourhoods and cities, while remaining adaptable to local contexts.

From assessment to continuous improvement

Crucially, the Safe City Certification is not a one‑off label. It is designed as a dynamic process, supporting cities in monitoring progress over time, prioritising investments, and embedding safety into everyday planning and decision‑making.

The framework has been tested and refined in SOTERIA Living Labs, ensuring that it responds to real municipal needs and operational realities. In the longer term, it offers a foundation for a scalable and transferable European approach to urban safety certification, aligned with Vision Zero and sustainable mobility goals.

By bridging technology, policy, and lived experience, SOTERIA’s Safe City Certification turns safety from an abstract ambition into a practical pathway for safer, more inclusive cities.

References

SOTERIA (2025). Deliverable D1.4 – SOTERIA frameworks for safer urban environments

The piece has been authored by DEKRA, UOW and INTRA