Assessment and applicability of evaluation tools: Current practice in a sample of European countries and steps towards a state-of-the-art approach. Road Infrastructure Safety Management Evaluation Tools (RISMET), Deliverables No. 4 and 5.

This report surveys current practice in a sample of European countries with respect to the use of ten different tools for safety management of road systems. The report also proposes steps that can be taken to bring the use of these management tools closer to their state-of-the-art versions. These tools and their intended functions include: 1. Road safety audits, to help incorporating the best knowledge about how to design a safe road into decisions about the design and construction of new roads, thus making new roads safer than existing roads, 2. Safety inspections, which are ordinary periodical verification of the characteristics and defects that require maintenance work for reasons of safety, 3. Network screening, to survey road safety on the entire road system and identify those parts of the system that have a higher expected number of accidents, or a higher severity of accidents, than the rest of the system, 4. Accident modelling, to help identify and assess the importance of various factors that contribute to accidents and injuries, 5. Road protection scoring, to help identify roads which offer substandard protection from injury in case of an accident, 6. The identification and analysis of hazardous road locations, i.e. road locations that have an abnormally high number of accidents due to deficiencies of road design and/or traffic control, 7. Road safety impact assessment, which estimates the safety benefits expected from various road safety measures before these measures are introduced, 8. Monitoring of road user behaviour, to help detect unwanted changes in behaviour that may have an important effect on road safety, 9. Traffic conflict studies and naturalistic driving behaviour studies, which is the study of events that nearly lead to accidents or of driver behaviour in a natural setting, 10. In-depth accident studies, in order to learn more about the factors that precipitate accidents and the opportunities for controlling or removing these factors. A questionnaire survey was conducted in order to describe current use of these tools and assess the applicability, or ease of use, of the tools. The survey found that all countries use several of the tools listed above, but few countries use all of them. (Author/publisher)