Barriers to road safety investment for rural local governments

State and federal funded road safety programs enable local governments to address road safety deficiencies on local roads. The framing of these programs is crucial to their successful take-up and implementation, as the criteria for project selection, nomination process and co-funding arrangements can unintentionally create institutional barriers that discourage rural Local Governments from submitting projects for consideration. Investigation of the above has concluded that these unintended barriers can be addressed through performance, as opposed to crash-history based criteria, supported by targets and predictive models, and addressing the issue of proportionally higher costs faced by smaller local governments.