The reduction of the number of road accident fatalities by 50 %, by the year 2010, suggested by the EU, involves the active contribution of all the agents in charge of the road safety in Europe. Even though the accidents that happened in urban areas have a relative smaller severity, it is the place where, for the moment, in absolute terms, the major number of accidents take place in the EU countries, as well as generating serious consequences on the more vulnerable users (pedestrians, cyclists, children, the elderly…). The current action has as main objective the creation, validation, discussion and spreading, at European level, of the ‘best practices’ for the collection, processing and analysis of traffic accident (TA) data in urban areas. The foreseen final result fundamentally consists in the disposal of a European guide of advices or of “best practices” in order to implement / improve the traffic accident collection, analysis and monitoring systems in urban areas. For that, a compilation of the current “best practices” and on the exchange of experiences between municipalities from several EU countries will be counted on, added to the practical pilot experience that will be carried out as part of this project in several Spanish cities. With the spreading of this guide, the purpose is to contribute to the development of local tools in order to help giving answers and solutions, with more reliable and accurate knowledge, to the problematic of the accident rate in each municipality. The concrete actions that are developed in the project are the following ones: 1) Bibliographical revision and summary of the “state of the art” on the problem of underreporting, the quality, management and analysis / exploitation of TA data in urban area. 2) Development of an in-depth “case study” and application and evaluation of the best practices in some Spanish municipalities from different sizes. D1.1 [8] 3) Execution of a survey study with the objective of getting an approximation to the current situation and practice from a representative sample of European cities from different sizes. 4) Organization of a workshop where the results will be discussed, after the fulfilment of the previously exposed objectives. From all the information obtained from the previous stages, writing and spreading of the Guide of Best Practices throughout the EU. The document that is delivered hereafter is the Deliverable I: Quality and representativity of the traffic accident data in urban area: State of the art. In this stage, as it has been pointed out in the project statement, it is expected, through a bibliographical and documentary revision and summary, to get a general perspective of the state of the accident rate urban records in terms of data collection and information quality, as well as the rules in force in relation to the accident rate collection systems at the European level. The results obtained in this first stage mean a starting point on which the next stages of the SAU study will be developed.