Modern societies have developed excellent practices and procedures for improving safety. Most of these efforts have focused on safety issues on high volume paved roads. However, the situation on unpaved roads is not as encouraging. Scarce resources have governments in their efforts to provide safer roadway environments on these facilities. Due to the increased level of litigation arising from claims of negligence, it is no longer acceptable to do nothing because of limited resources. This paper provides a realistic approach to the dilemma faced by local officials responsible for unpaved roads. It is based on research conducted since 1994 in defining a new set of criteria to assist local governments in improving unpaved road safety. Worldwide, safety improvements are needed on low volume unpaved roads. This paper also presents approaches used to improve local rural unpaved road safety. Safety improvements include definable benefits for the real world; benefits that are practical, needed, and acceptable. The examples presented in this paper serve as guidelines to define, analyze, and solve existing safety problems. Although techniques to improve local unpaved road safety use proven technology, the acceptance of the approach reported in this paper will advance the state-of-the-art by developing into a format which can be used by "real world" practitioners. Case study surveys of practitioners, users and safety experts are presented to help define the proposed safety improvement program. A Delphi procedure was used to document the final analysis approach. (A)
Abstract