Road traffic accident rate in Russia: main socio-economic factors of its formation and spatio-temporal features

For more than a decade, the Russian state has been actively engaged in issues of preservation of people, but the positive effects of this work quickly disappeared (2014-2016), and the trend again changed to a negative one. The First (2006-2012) and the Second (2013-2020) Federal Target Programs on Road Safety were aimed at reducing the number of deaths in road traffic accidents, and made a positive contribution to the field of preservation of people. For instance, in 2006-2019, the annual number of deaths in road traffic accidents decreased from 32,724 to 16,981 people per year, or almost twice. Nevertheless, there are still many problems in ensuring road safety. One of them is the complexity of the system processes of road safety management in such a large country as the Russian Federation. Russia consists of 85 heterogeneously developed economically and socially entities on the territory of which representatives of 190 peoples live. The article analyses a wide range of issues related to the assessment of the impact of the sociocenosis features on one of the most important characteristics of road traffic accident rate - the severity. The purpose of the research is to study the influence of the characteristics of representative socio-economic factors on road traffic accident severity in Russian regions, and to developthe most effective differentiated approach to the financing of regional road safety programs on this basis. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the model confirmation of the previously put forward ideas about the positive impact of the basic socio-economic institutions that shape road users’ transport behavior on its safety. The authors consider these ideas in relation to Russia as a whole and to the relationship of regional road traffic accident rate with the economic and demographic characteristics of Russians’ life. The paper presents the rank patterns of influence on road traffic accident severity of such characteristics of regional sociocenosis as the population’s median age, the share of population with income below the minimum wage, and the average monthly income. We show the conceptual considerations for improving road safety in the Russian Federation in the spatiotemporal continuum.