This paper was presented at the "Designing and building safer roads" workshop. These proceedings are available on CD-ROM. The paper discusses the implications on the practice of highway design of the 1997 Safety Review carried out by a special committee of Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) on the as yet unopened first stage of Highway 407 in Toronto, Ontario. Beginning with a brief overview of the origins of the 407 Safety Review, we provide an outline of the Committee's mandate followed by a summary of the process which the Committee followed and its key findings. The latter fall into two key areas: findings directed at the specific technical mandate; and those directed at the more general question of procedures which might help to ensure that an appropriate amount of safety is built into a road. We focus the remainder of our paper on the latter, starting with an examination of current practice in highway design in the light of the findings of the Safety Review Committee's work as well as in the context of the currently rapidly expanding base of knowledge and techniques for explicitly evaluating the safety implications of different designs of specific road elements. Factors mitigating against the application of this knowledge base are then discussed and in a final section, we examine alternative ways and means of dealing with these impediments as well as their implications for the practice of highway design. (A)
Abstract