Nowadays, Road Safety Inspections (RSI) are recognized as an effective tool for identifying safety deficiencies of road infrastructures. They represent a low cost process for the evaluation of the network safety performance. Its applicability in rural local roads, where accident data generally do not give enough information for the safety analysis, make the procedure very attractive. However, due to the subjective nature of the process RSI may give rise to disagreements which limit their effectiveness. The paper describes the RSI procedures defined by the IASP research program. The project is aimed at defining a methodological approach for the safety analysis and the restoration of rural highways specially suited for local rural roads. Various countries adopted RSI procedures but, in the main, they are not operational in nature. As part of the project, safety inspections of 100 km of two lane rural roads have been carried out. The IASP safety inspection procedures reflect the scope of the project and give some quantitative safety evaluation, to the best extent compatible with a methodology mainly based on subjective evaluations. For this purpose, the research was focused on the review framework, on the reviewers and client roles and, with special emphasis, on the methodologies used for identifying and ranking the safety problems. Phases of the inspection procedures have been defined: preliminary inspection, general inspection, detailed inspection and night time inspection. For each phase, objectives of the inspection, needed equipments, inspection methodology and roles of each team member have been defined and synthetically described in the paper. General inspection checklists, relative to the main safety features which may be present with continuity along two lane rural roads, and detailed inspection modules, differentiated for segments and intersections, have been defined. Moreover, criteria for identifying and ranking safety issues have been briefly reported. Last, the review report contents and format have been described. The procedure has proved to be effective for identifying most safety issues. As far as alignment geometric defects and design consistency evaluation is concerned, RSI are not as valuable as quantitative methods that may usefully integrate the inspection results. As a research outcome, a RSI operative manual has been produced to transfer to other road agencies the acquired knowledge and to obtain greater objectivity in the inspection process. (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E217780.
Abstract