The Department of Traffic Safety and Environment (TSE) of the Danish Road Directorate has since 1992 carried out a number of surveys in order to determine whether Safety Audit, a procedure developed in England, is applicable to the safety work of the Danish Road Administrations. In 1993, TSE published a manual "Safety Audit for Highways", in the following referred to as the Manual. In the Manual, p.8, section 1.14, the following is stated: "The purpose of Safety Audit is to ensure that all new road projects - and major operating and maintenance activities on existing roads - are evaluated from a safety point of view, in order to systematically uncover in time, solutions which are bad for traffic safety and make corrections before they are carried out in full scale". In the Manual, the process itself is described as an ideal case scenario. It includes a number of check lists which are used in practice when auditing the various steps of the design process and of the finished construction. It is important to realize that Safety Audit can be perceived as part of a more general policy for quality assurance. On this subject, the Manual (p.8, l.9) states; "when making quality assurance on a road project, the road board is the customer. In connection with a traffic safety audit the customers are also the road-users. The traffic safety audit should therefore be conducted on the basis of the road-users in consideration of their skills, knowledge and needs, and from the perspective of all groups of road-users". This view plays an essential role in the practical work. Even if the Manual is elaborated in reference to main roads, it will not be difficult to apply the principles to county and local roads and it must be assumed that standardized principles for quality assurance in the long run will be applied throughout the whole road system. In 1993, the Road Directorate decided to carry out a pilot project on a traffic safety audit. The project was to run till the end of 1994 and then be evaluated externally. In the Spring of 1995, the Road Directorate established an external panel to carry out this evaluation. The terms of reference of the panel is enclosed in Appendix 1. The panel was asked to complete its work before the Summer of 1995. This report contains the panel’s considerations and recommendations. (Author/publisher)
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