Safety PL– A Support Tool for Road Safety Impact Assessment

Abstract

Published on 19 November 2008, the European Union's Directive 2008/96/EC is one of the most important EU documents setting out a road safety orientation, in particular, road infrastructure safety management. It identifies four main areas of activity: road safety impact assessment, road safety audit, ranking of high accident concentration sections and network safety ranking and road infrastructure safety inspection.The Directive was implemented in Poland under the Act of 13 April 2012 “on amending the Public Roads Act and some other Acts”. The Act implements three of the Directive's four actions: road safety assessment, road safety audit, ranking of sections and network ranking. The Directive is further implemented under documents issued by the Director of the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways (GDDKiA).In 2011 the GDDKiA commissioned the Gdansk University of Technology and Krakow University of Technology to prepare an Instruction for Road Safety Assessment. The document helps with conducting the procedure for all newly designed national roads. Having implemented these guidelines, the GDDKiA, in an effort to improve design quality, requires designers to prepare such assessments for all planned and newly designed national roads.The road safety assessment uses a generalised model of linear regression to estimate the relations between selected road and traffic factors and selected road safety measures (number of accidents, injuries, fatalities and accident costs). The procedure comprises around twelve steps and differs depending on the type of road (class G, GP, A and S roads) and cross-section (1×2, 2×2, 2×3). It includes a number of variables representing road location, year of analysis and roadside.The authors of this article present a concept of implementing computational procedures previously used for a road safety impact assessment in the PTV Visum application. As a result, it will be possible to include models used for assessing selected road safety measures into the traffic volume forecast tool. Thanks to this it will be possible to calculate the number of accidents, victims and accident costs for all analysed variants of traffic spatial distribution. By automating this process, we will be able to speed up work and reduce analytical errors.