When Does Regulation Improve Road Freight Safety? A Narrative Review of Compliance, Enforcement, and Implementation

Abstract

Road freight safety research extensively documents risk factors, but less often connects regulatory intervention, implementation conditions, and crash outcomes within a single analytical framework. This review examines the mechanisms and conditions through which regulation can generate safety effects.

A structured narrative review was conducted using a pre-assembled, non-exhaustive corpus of 100 publications issued between 1993 and 2025. The corpus was not generated through a de novo systematic database search. Studies were grouped into eight regulatory domains and classified into three levels of inference: direct intervention evaluation, implementation analysis, and indirect contextual evidence.

The corpus includes 54 direct evaluations, 21 implementation studies, and 25 indirect studies. Driving and rest periods, weight and overloading, and dangerous goods were the most represented domains (n = 15 each). Evidence closest to regulatory intervention was concentrated in driving hours, inspection, speed management, and overload control. Traceability and detection technologies primarily improve observability and compliance; their translation into crash reduction depends on operational feasibility, interception capacity, credible enforcement, and corrective follow-up.

The synthesis supports a six-component sequential model linking rule design, feasibility, observability, enforcement and correction, compliance and risk exposure, and crash outcomes. The framework separates the justification for regulation from evidence of regulatory effectiveness and offers an analytical tool for public authorities and freight operators.

JEL Classification : L91, R41, K32.

Paper type: Theoretical research - narrative review.