Assessment of road infrastructures in Iraq according to safe system requirements: case study Old Baquba-Baghdad rural road sections

Abstract

Safe system is a new vision recommended by global organisation interested in achieving safer road system in the world. Methodologies have been developed to consider this approach in assessing the safety level of new and existing road infrastructures in most of the world countries. In Iraq, most of the conducted studies investigated the road safety level at aggregated national scale. However, there are no studies consider the safe system approach in assessing the road safety situation. Therefore, this paper aims to assess the road safety level at road section scale according to the safe system approach. For this, international methodologies were reviewed to select the most appropriate one. The international road assessment programme (iRAP) was selected as it has been recommended by the UN and WHO. The old Baquba-Baghdad rural road which is a two way-two lane road was selected for this study. The necessary data was collected from a previous study and from field observations, and then was processed using the iRAP programme to quantify the risk scores and the star rating of head-on overtaking crashes for vehicle occupants as this is the most common crashes recorded at the selected sections. The results showed that the star rating of the study road is one to two which reflects the dangerous situation. Therefore, four countermeasures were suggested to improve the level of safety, three of them has been already implemented which are upgrading some sections to four lane road with separated physical median and improving the skid resistance of the road surface. The results of assessment after improvement showed that the implemented improvements may reduce the fatalities rate by about 60% and upgrade the star rating to 3 in some sections and less in others. Therefore, it is recommended to upgrade the two lanes sections to four lanes and extend the physical separation median to all these sections which will eliminate the risk of the head-on overtaking crashes as the results of the assessment produced.