“ERA-NET ROAD — Coordination and Implementation of Road Research in Europe” was a Coordination Action funded by the 6th Framework Programme of the EC. The partners in the 2009 ERA-NET ROAD (ENR) Safety at the heart of road design initiative were the United Kingdom, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Belgium, Hungary and Ireland (http://www.road-era.net). Within the framework of ENR this joint research project was initiated. The project aims at developing suitable road safety engineering evaluation tools as anticipated by the ERANET Programme "Safety at the Heart of Road Design" (2009) and furthermore those of the Directive for Road Infrastructure Safety Management (2008). These evaluation tools allow the easy identification of both unsafe (from crashes or related indicators) and potentially unsafe (from design and other criteria) locations in a road network. With such evaluation tools estimates of potential benefits at the local and the network level can be calculated and potential effects on aspects such as driver behaviour can be estimated. Such tools empower road authorities to improve their decision-making and to implement (ameliorative) measures to improve the road safety situation on the roads. RISMET provides a set of easy to use guidelines and codes of practice for the development and use of comprehensive road safety engineering evaluation tools. These systems based tools consider the relationship between road design, road user behaviour, traffic and road safety. These recommendations are the second in a set of two developed in RISMET and cover specifically the development and application of infrastructure focussed evaluation tools that are currently recommended for state of the art road infrastructure safety management. (Author/publisher)
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