This booklet was produced as a result of research that the AA Foundation for Road Safety Research in collaboration with TMS Consultancy has conducted with practitioners in highway authorities in Birmingham and Cambridgeshire, England. It provides a road user's view on highway design, and shows how a good safety audit can prevent problems. It should help everyone concerned with providing and maintaining safer roads, including designers, policy makers, and politicians. It gives details of a series of design problems often found by safety engineers during the road safety process. TMS Consultancy produced a list of 52 common problems, which was discussed with a wider group of auditors, each of whom was asked to identify the 20 most important problems. The booklet lists the 23 most important problems identified by the group as a whole, giving scores indicating the degrees of consensus about the problems' importance. The booklet describes the problems most important for: (1) pedestrians; (2) people with disabilities; (3) cyclists; (4) motorcyclists; (5) vehicle users on links; and (6) vehicle users at junctions. It also contains a brief section outlining accident statistics for different types of road users.
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