Road Safety Impact Assessment: RIA

Road safety is a quality aspect of road traffic and this aspect has to be balanced with aspects like: level of service, access for destinations, environmental impact, costs etc., when it comes to decisions in what infrastructural projects to invest. In decision making on infrastructural projects road safety arguments have to be considered as explicit as possible in the planning phase already. An instrument has been developed in this study with this aim: Road Safety Impact Assessment RIA. RIAs could be made on a more strategic level and on an individual project or scheme level. For both levels different tools are developed. On a strategic level, we suggest to assess safety consequences of changes (redistributions) of traffic over a road network due to infrastructural projects (new roads, new lay out of roads) by using a scenario technique. This technique uses the fact that different categories of roads (with different road and traffic chracteristics) turn out to have different road safety records dependent on traffic volumes. By modelling road type, values of relevant safety indicators and traffic volumes road safety impacts can be calculated of different alternatives. A proposal has been developed for the content of (the first phase of) a RIA. Secondly, on a project level, we suggest to use an audit technique to make as explicit as possible the safety consequences of certain choices in the detailed planning and the design process and to optimize a road design. The primary objective of using an audit technique is to ensure that road safety is optimally incorporated during the design and realisation phase of infrastructure projects. Independency of auditors is considered of great importance. Different checklists have to be developed in a follow up study. We recommend to use the results of this study as a first draft for a RIA and to gain experiences with this tool for EU projects on a voluntary basis, before making a RIA compulsory. An EU-cooperative effort may be considered to reach some sort of agreement on the specifications of RIAs and to create a database with (EU)RIA-methodology and -results. When these results are satisfying, we recommend to integrate the procedure for a RIA in existing procedures for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), as indicated in EC Directive 85/337, and not to initiate new procedures for a RIA. This recommendation is based on the positive experiences with EIAs. By integration of the EIA and RIA procedures, we expect an im-proved quality of the decision process, without the drawback of more time consuming of distinct procedures. Of course, individual Member States could decide to use more stricter regulations