Accident rate and severity reduction at roadwork sites requires an integrated and systematic approach aimed at identifying and solving the safety problems. An effective approach, which is quickly spreading at international level, is the workzone safety audit. Road safety audit is a formal examination of a future road or traffic project, an existing road, or any project which interacts with road users, where an independent, qualified team reports on the project’s potential accident and safety performance, by trying to investigate how the road environment is perceived, and ultimately utilised by different road users. The paper presents a road safety audit procedure specifically suited for workzones. It is based on detailed checklists and on risk assessment. New risk indicators, that involve the prediction of the number and severity of potential accidents associated with each safety item, have been defined: the Total Weighted Score of the main safety aspects, which relates to the risk factors that may be improved by engineering measures, and the Global Safety Index, which allows the evaluation of the global safety of the workzone and the ranking of workzones in the road network. The proposed safety evaluation procedure is strongly related to the safety consequences of the identified problems, rather than on the standard non-compliance or on the number of deficiencies. Pilot safety audits, which have been carried out both in urban and rural areas, have identified many safety issues, whose removal or mitigation requires low cost safety measures. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting