Road safety management system for Oliveira do Bairro

Abstract

The infrastructure departments of the Portuguese municipalities must strive to begin to use advanced information technology tools to increase institutional productivity and effectiveness in managing road safety. At the moment, they are beginning to understand the advantages of using road safety management systems. This paper describes the road safety management system developed for the City Council of Oliveira do Bairro that has helped the road safety unit in its tasks of planning, designing, developing, implementing and evaluating appropriate engineering response strategies that deal with road safety concerns throughout the municipality. The road safety management system is composed of a road database and a safety evaluation tool and it uses a road network model that was developed using a geographical information system. The road database stores information about accident characteristics, road geometry, pavement condition, traffic, operating and environmental conditions, maintenance history, and other characteristics of the road environment. The safety evaluation tool is used to compute several road safety indexes and other accident parameters for each element of the road network and allows the definition of a list of road elements with priority of application of countermeasures. The Chassiakos methodology to be used by the municipality for black sections assessment in municipal roads with availability of traffic data is recommended. For municipal roads in which traffic data are not available, the application of the relative severity index methodology is recommended. Using the priority list and the results of safety audits, short-term countermeasures can be defined with the goal of reducing road accidents and their impact on society.