Monitoring the safety of road infrastructure and cycling infrastructure : pilots in a number of Dutch regions. Currently, data on road crash casualties provide local authorities with insufficient starting points for their road safety policy. The regional road safety bodies of the Dutch provinces of Gelderland (ROVG, currently the ROV Eastern Netherlands), Fryslân (ROF) and Zeeland (ROVZ) and the province of Utrecht have therefore asked SWOV to join them in monitoring a number of alternative indicators. In literature these alternative indicators are known as ‘safety performance indicators’ abbreviated as SPIs. SPIs are indicators for risk factors that exhibit a strong causal relationship with road safety. One of the most important developments is the desire of provinces (and increasingly also of municipalities) to make more proactive policy. Recently a tool has been developed that allows measuring and prioritizing road safety in a more proactive way (ProMeV). Starting point for the monitoring pilot was to begin the study with a limited set of indicators for risk factors that were on the ‘wish list’ of the above mentioned provinces and that also meet the definition of an SPI. This yielded indicators for a) drink-driving, b) speed, c) quality of road infrastructure, and d) bicycle safety risks. This report discusses a pilot study that was carried out to develop a monitoring network for SPIs that measure two factors: ? quality of the road infrastructure, and ? quality of the cycling infrastructure. This test is based on SWOV recommendations for developing a decentralized monitoring network for infrastructure (Dijkstra & Aarts, 2014) and an analysis that was performed to define SPIs for bicycle safety (Wijlhuizen & Aarts, 2014 and Wijlhuizen et al., 2014). Based on the latter reports, the quality of the cycling infrastructure has been identified as one of the relevant factors for which an SPI is desired. Measurements for the test have been carried out at 50 km/hour roads and adjacent cycling infrastructure in different municipalities in the provinces of Gelderland, Zeeland and Fryslân. The measurements were made using Cyclomedia images. These were converted into data by checking each 25 metres of road for the presence or absence of predefined road characteristics or hazardous situations. This data was used to determine the Sustainable Safety level of the road infrastructure (using the Sustainable Safety Indicator) as well as scores for safe speeds and credible speed limits (using the SaCredSpeed instrument). In relation with the cycling infrastructure the data was used to determine safety bottlenecks according to the method Safe Cycling Network (Wijlhuizen et al., 2014). The report describes: 1. how the safety quality of the road and cycling infrastructure can be expressed in SPIs and how governments can put the collected data to use. 2. the experiences with the method that was followed and what upscaling these measurements to provincial or local level involves in terms of costs and time. 3. the insights that can result from comparison of structured measurements. The organization of a monitoring network and the actors who can play a role are also considered.
Samenvatting