Quantification of Road Safety Risk at Locations Without Collisions to Justify Road Safety Investments

Since creating its Road Improvement Program (RIP), the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) has invested more than $110 million in road safety improvements in British Columbia, Canada. The RIP partners with provincial road authorities to identify problem locations and implement interventions to improve road safety. The level of ICBC investment in a safety project has been based on the potential for collision reduction associated with the proposed improvements. The goal has been to target collision-prone locations to reduce frequency and severity of collisions and, therefore, auto insurance claim costs to ICBC. Although the projects funded by the RIP were entirely necessary and effective, the reactive nature of the program did not allow for investments at locations that were deemed to be high risk but that did not have a significant history of collisions. In recognition that some attention should be given to these high-risk, low-crash locations, a new program was developed to provide funding to support road improvement projects that were not based on a history of collisions. The new program, referred to as the Proactive Road Safety Program, complemented the reactive program through the provision of funding support for projects that could prevent, rather than reduce, collisions. This paper describes the rationale and methodology developed for the Proactive Road Safety Program to quantify road safety risk and assign an economic value to justify funding for proactive road safety projects.