Protecting against human error, and recognising that mistakes are an intrinsic part of human behaviour, is fundamental to the now widely supported ‘safe system’ approach to road safety. Safe road infrastructure has significant potential to complement efforts to improve behaviour of road users and the safety of vehicles by minimising the chances of a crashes occurring and the severity of those that do occur. iRAP Star Ratings are based on road inspection data and provide a simple and objective measure of the level of safety which is ‘built-in’ to the road for car occupants, motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians. Fivestar roads are the safest while one-star roads are the least safe. Importantly, Star Ratings can be completed without reference to detailed crash data, which is often unavailable in low-income and middle-income countries. Apart from illustrating which roads present a higher level of risk than others, the RPS and Star Ratings provide a basis for developing fatality estimations for a network and road safety countermeasures. This is discussed further in Safer Roads Investment Plans: The iRAP Methodology. The iRAP Star Rating protocol will continue to be refined in the future as new research on road infrastructure risk factors is completed and published. (Author/publisher)
Abstract