The use of 10 formal tools for road safety management in 18 European countries was surveyed by means of a questionnaire sent to national highway agencies. Use of the management tools was found to vary. An attempt was made to determine whether a relationship existed between use of the tools and safety performance. The basic hypothesis was that the more extensive use a country made of the safety management tools, the better would be its safety performance. Four statistical analyses were made to test this hypothesis. Results were ambiguous, but no clear support for the hypothesis emerged. However, the study has serious limitations and is essentially inconclusive. It nevertheless identifies an approach that might give clearer results if the study is replicated in a larger sample of countries.