Fatalities and injuries on "secondary roads" in rural areas count up to 40% of the total number of fatalities and injuries involved in road accidents in Europe. Due to lower traffic volumes, accidents resulting from similar deficiencies in design are not so heavily clustered on "secondary roads" as on primary roads. Therefore it is difficult to set up common intervention criteria for both roads. Furthermore, fatalities have shown different distribution characteristics in the road network than accidents in general. Moreover different kinds of accidents related to a different environmental as well as behavioural background are likely to happen on "secondary roads" compared to primary roads. The objective of this handbook is to supply a practical tool based on best practices commonly agreed at European Level and focused on "Secondary Roads", intended as "2 lanes Rural Roads", as better explained in the following section. The actual need of this new term for a clear definition of the physical infrastructures targeted by the handbook was discussed during the 1st Ripcord-lserest conference and a public version of the WF13 first report has been specifically issued for collection of comments and suggestions by external experts, that basically confirmed the usefulness of the new adopted term. This handbook is addressed to those road managers without accident data availability or with low capability of managing such data: the handbook can also help the local road managers in taking practical decisions about road safety interventions and it is free available by downloading from the project website. A specific case is examined in the "Annex A", where are summarized the two-lane roads safety problems and the general applications for the solutions in Turkey. (Author/publisher)
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