Safety Inspection and Management Tools for Low-Volume Road Network

Abstract

On low-volume roads, where crash frequency is less than on high-volume roads, the role of procedures alternative to and complementing crash investigations becomes substantially more important; safety inspections as a proactive approach to road safety can be very effective for this class of roads. From the results of the European Union research report Identification of Hazard Location and Ranking of Measures to Improve Safety on Local Rural Roads, a safety risk index (SRI) was formulated as a measure of risk that uses the safety inspection as the primary source of information associated with design consistency assessment of the horizontal alignment. Moreover, because of its quantitative evaluation, the SRI can be used to determine benefits and a cost–benefit ratio of different intervention strategies. Then, since there are often situations in which the available budget will not be enough to undertake all the measures in the road network, an SRI-based optimization algorithm was defined for selecting projects to be included in the budget.