Road safety audits a proactive approach to improve transportation safety. A road safety audit is an examination of an existing or future road or intersection by independent, qualified audit team who then reports on safety issues raised during the examination. It can be used in any phase of project development from planning and preliminary engineering, design, construction, and on existing roads. Road safety audits can also be used on any sized project from minor intersection and roadway retrofits to mega-projects. Road safety audit is an excellent tool to identify potential safety problems to the road users and to assure that safety measures to eliminate or reduce the problems are fully considered. Road users should travel on a consistently safe product where adverse highway factor contributing to accidents is very low, and the road safety audit is a procedure that enables thischieve that. One of the main objectives nowadays in traffic safety is to reduce the number of accidents and the number of casualties. The application of safety principles when implementing, improving or maintaining roads contribute to accident prevention. Introducing road safety audit procedures, with systematic application into various stages of highway projects, can ensure that they will operate as safely as practicable, meaning that safety will be considered throughout the whole project. In the longer term, safety audits encourage good design. They give safety a higher profile in the design process and acts as a conduit for informing engineers of current safety understanding. The recommendations of safety auditors are not based on checking individual design elements against standards, but on considering how the scheme as a whole may affect overall safety, or deciding what to do when standards conflict. Road safety audit can be conducted at one or more stages of a specific project as described in this paper. Safety principles are also presented to assist on assessing technical issues of the safety audit (A).For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E217780.
Samenvatting