Road safety engineering risk assessment – Update on Austroads research program

ARRB are involved in an extensive range of research aimed at identifying the level of risk for different road stereotypes, and at the reduction in this risk resulting from changes in 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. This paper will provide an update on recent research, including:

• database development (collection of data from all Australasian jurisdictions combining crash data, network information and traffic data)
• investigation of risk reduction for various safety treatments in different environments
• the implications for varying design standards on risk
• development of a crash monitoring database for use by all Australasian authorities
• use of crash cost as an indication of severity in different road environments
• indepth investigation of rural head-on and rural intersection crashes
• safety implications of road deterioration
• investigation of crash risk migration

The paper discusses practical use of this information by policy makers and practitioners in the form of the Road Safety Risk Manager software. It also covers proposals for future research in the area of risk reduction, including network based approaches.