Safety Audits of Existing Roads Database

This paper describes the development of a system for recording and analyzing the data found from Safety Audits of Existing Roads, undertaken by Transfund New Zealand within various Road Controlling Authorities (RCAs). The resulting database has been used for some years to identify common safety issues found in audits and to highlight these issues to practitioners. The authors summarizes the key findings from the 33 audits to date, on the topics including the relative safety performance of different road features (warning signs, surface condition, poles or other objects, pedestrians, intersection control, edge marker posts, shoulder slopes, drains, guard-rails, overtaking opportunities, passing lanes, and horizontal alignment), RCA groups, large cities versus smaller districts, and urban versus rural road networks. A final section discusses future developments in the Safety Audits of Existing Roads and the development of a more objective procedure to rank the finding of these audits, the Road Safety Risk Manager program.