Netwerk Safety Management : een ranking van gevaarlijke segmenten op de autosnelwegen van het TEN-T netwerk in Vlaanderen.

The European directive 2008/96/EC on road infrastructure safety management involves the implementation of procedures relating to road safety impact assessment, road safety audits, the management of road network safety and safety inspections by the member states. This Directive was implemented into Flemish legislation by the Decision of the Flemish Government (dd. 3/2/2012) on the execution of the decree of June 17, 2011 on road infrastructure safety management, published in the Belgian Government Gazette on April 19, 2012. This legislation imposes, among others, a classification of road segments with a high number of accidents and a classification of the road safety of the road network. As the first classification is targeted at the number of crashes, the second is targeted at the potential to improve road safety. The application of the decree is limited to those road segments that make up the trans-European road network (TEN-T), which in Flanders resembles mainly the highway network. In this report — as the first step in the process of road safety management — a screening of the TEN-T road network in the Flanders region is carried out. The goal of this screening is the selection of a relatively small group of road segments that afterwards can be subjected to an in-depth investigation that will allow proposing appropriate measures. The network screening as such is therefore not an ultimate goal, but merely the first step to ameliorate the road safety on dangerous locations. The Empirical Bayes (EB) method is considered the state-of-the-art approach in identifying dangerous road segments in scientific literature. Therefore we will be using this approach in this study. The EB approach offers a solution to 2 problems when estimating the number of crashes: it provides for regression to the mean and it improves the accuracy of the estimation by calculating it as a weighted average of the actual number of crashes and the normal number of crashes where the latter is based on the outcomes of a risk model. (Author/publisher)