engleski

Road Safety Audit in Urban Road Design by the European Directive on Road Infrastructure Safety Management

In 2008, European Union brought the Directive 2008/96/EC, dealing with road infrastructure safety. The goal of the Directive is to increase safety of the Trans-European Networks (TEN), including every stage, from planning, design and construction to usage and maintenance. Although the application of the Directive is mandatory for TEN roads, it is recommended to apply the Directive to other road infrastructure as well as the one in urban areas. If human factors and the environment are included in the design phase as road accident causes (not just the minimum conditions required, mostly related to technical road infrastructure characteristics), there can be a great achievement in reducing the probability of an accident to occur. Besides that, the external costs caused by road accidents will be much smaller if the possibilities for an accident to occur are eliminated in the infrastructure design stage, and not in the usage or maintenance stage (a posteriori). The stated fact is included in the Directive as RSA (Road Safety Assessment), which is a procedure implemented in the road design stage in order to determine how the project contributes to road safety. The paper shows which basic elements of road safety audit exist in the urban road design stage.

road safety audit; RSA; urban road design; Directive on road infrastructure safety management; urban road safety

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