During planning, a safety audit represents an essential part of the overall road safety management system. Whereas a recent systematic overview of the audit practice in the Länder and on its spread in municipalities is non-existing. The aim was therefore to initially fill the knowledge gaps regarding actual application and organizational implementation of safety audits. For this purpose, a research on the application of safety audits on Länder level and municipality level was carried out, as well as an investigation on the implementation of audits. Likewise, an exchange of experience with auditors of road construction authorities of the Laender and with auditors of urban administrations was organised. In addition, 200 audit reports concerning measures on rural and urban roads were assessed, including the associated comments. Based on this findings, a detailed investigation was carried out, taking into account the audited measures already realised and implemented, and with an accident occurrence statistic of at least three years after traffic approval. While the exchanges of experiences yielded largely coinciding statements with regard to the auditing of measures on rural and urban roads, evaluation of the 200 audits as well as the detailed analysis of the audits of rural roads and urban roads yielded different findings. Finally, recommendations for further development of the audit practice in Germany were derived, as well as their taking into account in the updated version of the ESAS (Recommendations for Road Safety Audit in Germany). The essential component for inclusion in the update version of the ESAS was the development of deficit lists in the future available in electronic form, by means of which an audit can be checked for completeness. Furthermore, they can be used for documentation and analysis of audit results. (Author/publisher)
Abstract