Wire Rope Barrier Effectiveness on Victorian Roads

Loss-of-control crashes represent a major source of serious road trauma, in the five years to 2009, well over half of all fatal and serious injury crashes in rural Victoria, nearly 5,000 crashes, were the result of vehicles running off the road or being involved in head-on crashes (VicRoads data, 2010). Of these, around 3,000 involved hitting a roadside object. Flexible barriers, or wire rope barriers, are considered one of the most effective countermeasures to this crash problem based on international evaluations, but to date no evaluation has been undertaken on the effectiveness of this barrier on Victorian roads. An evaluation was completed by Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) and included 100 km of flexible barrier, installed over ten prominent Victorian routes. The results indicated significant reductions in crashes. This paper presents and discusses the results of the evaluation.