User behavior is generally seen as the most important source of improvement in terms of road safety. Nevertheless, measures to improve vehicles or roadway infrastructure are still necessary. Studies have revealed that the"infrastructure" factor was present in about 30-40% of fatal accidents. This paper aims at presenting and illustrating, by giving concrete examples, a comprehensive road safety method : Network Safety Management (NSM). NSM comprises the first step of a comprehensive safety analysis that enablesroad administrations to detect sections or itineraries within the networkwhere an improvement of the infrastructure is expected to be highly cost-efficient. Then, these sections can be ranked by their potential savings in accident costs in order to provide a priority list of sections to be treated. Many countries are seriously engaged in reducing the number of fatalities and casualties on their roads. Improving road safety of the existingnetwork will contribute to reaching this target. For countries having reliable accident data and statistics, NSM can be an important element of a comprehensive and cost efficient safety analysis. For the covering abstractsee ITRD E139491.
Samenvatting