The Danish guidelines for geometric design of roads and paths in rural areas are guided by a basic philosophy of designing and establishing roads so that the desired speed is not only a design parameter stipulated by road planners, but also the speed that road users experience as the most natural and most comfortable. Denmark is an old agricultural country with intensively farmed land and short distances between farms and between towns. The highly developed industry of modern Danish society is dispersed across the country so that the road network is dense and multifunctional. Therefore, it is difficult to establish a clear and unambiguous functional road classification. Even the motorways serve as access roads in some places. Therefore, it has been necessary to choose a comparatively simple functional classification and to seek to increase road safety by a supporting speed classification. In order to ensure that road users actually drive at the speed desired by the road planners, the Road Directorate has worked on a self-explaining road concept over the last couple of years. The self-explaining road must be designed so that all geometric elements, road markings and road equipment work together as one unit, giving road users an unambiguous impression of who else is on the road (without being visible all the time), the geometric design and what speed behavior is safe. At the same time, the road and the road environment are as far as possible established in such a way that if the road user runs off the road by accident, the consequence for him/her and the other road users is minimized. This is called "the forgiving road."
Abstract