Road safety engineering risk assessment – recent and future research.

The Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) has been conducting an extensive range of research aimed at identifying and measuring the level of risk associated with different road stereotypes, and at the reduction in this risk resulting from changes in road design standards and from remedial treatments. This Austroads funded research is designed to aid policy makers and practitioners in assessing risk and prioritising treatment on their roads so as to achieve optimal crash risk reduction for the available budget.
Research topics include the development of crash rates databases, investigation of risk reduction for safety treatments in different environments, the implications of varying design standards, information on local road safety schemes, use of crash cost as an indication of severity, an in-depth investigation of rural head-on, intersection and run-off-road crashes, the safety implications of road deterioration, an investigation of crash risk migration, and the effect of using multiple countermeasures.
This paper provides examples of the results from some of this research.