When road safety policy is analyzed, three main areas of action can be defined corresponding to the three main actors involved in road safety: human, vehicle, and infrastructure. The three of them, usually called the three safety pillars, are addressed in different ways. However, this range of domains must be dealt with subject to budget limitations. Consequently, cost efficiency of systems and measures needs to be a decisive factor for policy making. Road infrastructure, as the most visible component of the road transport network, represents an area where safety investments can have an immediate benefit. In this context, RANKERS (RANKing for European Roads Safety) pursues the ambitious objective of developing scientifically-researched guidelines enabling optimal decision-making by road authorities in their efforts to promote safer roads and eradicate dangerous road sections. Co-funded by the European Commission, RANKERS is a research project designed to gain new knowledge by performing research and empirical studies of the road's interaction with the driver and his vehicle in order to identify optimal road recommendations and predict their impact on safety. The main output of the project will include an index used for assessing and monitoring road safety and a comprehensive catalogue of road infrastructure safety recommendations ranked according to their cost-effectiveness. RANKERS is unique in that it proposes to address traditional passive safety measures (forgiving roads) together with a better understanding of the accident causation scenarios, leading to a significant mitigation of the risks posed by the road and its environment. The roads design should be directly focused to the concept of making self-explaining roads, that is to say, advocating a traffic environment which elicits safe driving behaviour simply by its design so that the road user is neither confused nor invited to take risks (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E212343.
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