The Road Safety Risk Manager: Maximising Road Trauma Reductions from Engineering Countermeasures
Keywords: Crashes - Analysis
ARSRPE
Submission Date: 2001
Abstract
Road safety practitioners have expressed a need to have more confidence in prioritising road safety engineering treatments. These treatments can be generated through standard road safety programs, black-spot assessments, community initiation or from design and existing road safety audits.
The Road Safety Risk Manager process has been developed to provide road safety professionals with a tool to proactively assess road safety hazards and treatments for the purpose of prioritising actions. The tool adopts a risk management approach, with the ultimate aim of maximising the risk reduction on the road network for a given budget.
AUSTROADS commissioned ARRB Transport Research to develop a procedure to rank the recommendations emanating from the road safety audit of existing roads. Based on the findings of this project the risk management approach to prioritising road safety treatments was developed. The process is based on the measurement of risk as a function of exposure, likelihood and severity. Background research provides users with the ability to analyse the hazard risk and the treatment risk reduction for over 70 different types of deficiencies, across a variety of different road types and severity outcomes. Following inclusion of treatment costs, the derived risk-cost ratio forms the basis of prioritising the proposed works. During initial testing it became evident that the process could be applied to all road safety treatments and not just those emanating from road safety audits.
Current developments are focussed on the development of a user friendly computer based system that can be used by auditors, investigators, project managers and asset owners to meet their specific needs of risk identification, risk management and the development of remedial treatment programs. With a targeted approach to engineering treatments those works most likely to maximise the reduction in road trauma can be completed.