Public officials are constantly looking for ways to improve roadways safety especially for walkers, but with increasingly scarce funds, it is difficult to seek-out new ideas of area-engineering, enforcement, legislation, training and public education. This paper presents how to obtain a preventive method for improving road safety, which gives solutions that can be easily evaluated by project officials or managers, integrating two different techniques: the "Operational Safety Review" and the "typical accident scenarios". Road Safety Audit is a formal assessment of the safety of a future road; in the case of an existing road, this method is called "Operational Safety Review" (OSR). This is a method of prevention of road accidents, which consists in an examination by an independent team of trained specialists, who assesses the crash potential and safety performance of a road and prepares a report that identifies potential safety problems, proposing improvements. The method of typical accident scenarios, developed in France at the end of the 80s at the Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Securite (INRETS), takes its origin from the black spots analysis. Reviewing all the Police reports of a certain type of accidents occurred in an area, they are classified in order to their temporal and casual development. Every group of accidents which have particular similarities constitutes a scenario, and for every scenario some solution are proposed. In OSR, checklist are used during the drive-/or walk-through as a memorandum of all the factors that might cause crashes, but the solution to the problems should be given every time by the experts; to obviate this, typical accident scenarios can be associated to some problems which can constitute part of a checklist; consequently the solutions related to the scenario, would be automatically connected to the problems in the checklist and technicians would have solutions, among which they could choose the most suitable ones. As a case study Brescia (an Italian town with about 200.000 inhabitants) have been chosen, for which several typical pedestrian accident scenarios exist. Since 1991 the University of Brescia has been monitoring and mapping road accidents, developing a long experience about road safety in urban area and particularly about OSR and typical accident scenarios. The effectiveness of the integration of these two methods will be therefore proved through the creation of a database of typical accident scenarios with the solutions related, that the Public officials could easily manage. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Samenvatting