Road safety management at work zones

The main aim of IRIS (Incursion Reduction to Increase Safety in road work zones) is to share best-practices on traffic management at work zones with national road authorities in Europe for short-, medium- and long-term road works. IRIS is commissioned by the European platform for cooperation between national road authorities (CEDR) and executed by a consortium of Lund University (Sweden), the Kuratorium für Verkehrssicherheit (Austria) and Vias institute (Belgium). Central aim of the project is to provide practical recommendations for accident prevention at work zones across Europe.
This report aims at bringing together all the findings of the various activities of the IRIS project, i.e. about principles to be considered during planning, establishment and maintenance of work zones, as well as auditing and inspecting road works. Since safety at work zones, besides road
users’ safety, includes aspects of work safety, issues of road worker’s safety, human factors and recommendations for educational measures are also part of the report. Psychological trends and attitudes to improve safety at work zones were studied by a literature review related to psychology of perception and attention (e.g. unintentional blindness, useful field of view, etc.), environmental psychology (e.g. automatic behavioural change) and traffic psychology (e.g. human factors with impact on traffic behaviour). An inventory of best practices to prevent incursions into work zones as well as a review of best practices in work zone road safety audit and inspection requirements were made. Besides the systematic literature search, other available sources through knowledgeable experts in the field were used. To gather information on guidelines, standards, strategy and procedures, interviews with stakeholders have been made in several European countries, such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. These interviews resulted in a detailed overview of current practices in the selected countries.