Network safety management: a French-German co-operation.

The co-operation between France and Germany has got a long tradition and includes many fields such as politics, public service, or science. In one of their regular meetings the French and German Road Directors decided to bring experts of both countries together in order to exchange experience on safety analysis of existing road networks. As a result of this co-operation a joint paper on Network Safety Management (NSM) was produced. The methodology is based on the German Guidelines for Safety Analysis of Road Networks (ESN) and the French User Safety on the Existing Road Network (SURE) approaches which were developed further into an internationally applicable framework. Network Safety Management comprises the first step of a comprehensive safety analysis which enables road administrations to detect those sections within the network where 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 by road administrations. Indications are given how to determine possible improvement measures. Then, if needed, the cost of these measures can be compared to the potential savings in accident costs in order to determine the benefit-cost ratio of the measure for the section under review. This way, the NSM methodology provides road authorities with all the necessary information to spend the limited resources in the best way to improve road safety for the whole society. European countries are seriously engaged in reducing the number of fatalities and casualties on European roads. The European Commission has set the target of halving the number of deaths on the EU's roads until 2010. Improving road safety of the existing network will contribute to reaching this target. Therefore, Network Safety Management as an important element of a comprehensive safety analysis is a further step in this direction (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E212343.