Safety effects of road design standards in Europe

This paper deals with the result of a study carried out for the European Commission by the SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research, in cooperation with a number of other European institutes, and which was reported in 1994. The title of the study is "Safety Effects of Road Design Standards." The aims of this study were: Gathering information about existing knowledge on the design of road infrastructure elements by (a) drawing an inventory of international treaties and recommendations, with information about their legal status, and (b) drawing an inventory of national road design standards and the underlying knowledge; Analyzing the role safety arguments have played when road design standards were compiled; and Drawing a "best practice" for road design standards in which considerations, background information and assumptions concerning road safety have been made explicit. As a follow-up of this study, a new study will start by the end of this year (1995): SAFESTAR (Safety standards for road design and redesign). The task is "to develop safety standards for highway design and redesign on all classes of road, including tunnels and bridges, taking account of the proposals for technical standards made in the Trans-European Road Network (TERN) report." The second part of this paper contains a short description of the different so-called workpackages in this study.