Safety Inspection and Management of Road Network in Operation

European Union (EU) Directive 2008/96/EC on road infrastructure safety management, defining subject matter and scope, requires “the establishment and implementation of procedures relating to road safety impact assessments, road safety audits, the management of road network safety and safety inspections by the Member States”. Starting from the results of the EU research project “Identification of Hazard Locations and Ranking of Measures to Improve Safety on Local Rural Roads” (IASP), a Safety Risk Index (RI) has been formulated as measure of risk that uses Safety Inspection as primary source of information associated with design consistency assessment of the horizontal alignment. Moreover, due to its quantitative evaluation, RI can be used to determine benefits and cost/benefit ratio of different intervention strategies. Then, as there are often situations when the available budget will not be sufficient to undertake all the measures in the road network, an “RI based” optimization algorithm for selecting projects to be included in the budget was defined.