November 1998 Issue 6 |
Cindy Kerckhoffs
Parking Management |
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Inside this issue:
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Road Safety Audit - The Australian Approach
Summary In mid-1992, AUSTROADS (the national association of road transport and traffic authorities in Australasia) initiated a project to examine the benefits and costs of a national approach to road safety audit. After reviewing audit processes in Australia as well as internationally, it was concluded that road safety audit has real safety benefits for road users and that these benefits can be greater when the process is applied on a national basis. The end product of this project, the AUSTROADS (1994) Road Safety Audit guidelines, is now the focus for this important road safety engineering initiative in highway authorities around Australia and New Zealand. It has been well received in other countries as well, including South Africa, Malaysia, Canada and the United States of America. In each of these countries it has been used to assist with the introduction of the road safety audit process. This paper outlines road safety audit from the AUSTROADS perspective, providing an introduction into: road safety audit, it's costs and potential benefits, and how it can lead to safer roads. It also includes some lessons which have been learnt from road safety audits, highlighting the positive safety contribution that road safety audit is beginning to make. These audits were successful in identifying (and correcting) serious safety deficiencies in road designs which may otherwise have resulted in accidents. The paper also outlines some of the current issues in road safety audit which are applicable at the international level. Introduction Many road authorities have "blackspot" programs concerned with accident reduction (the development of accident remedial measures for high accident frequency sites). In the last few years, some road authorities have been focussing on accident prevention (ensuring that the design of new road and traffic schemes will provide a high level of safety), attempting to prevent accidents from happening, or at least to ensure that any accident effects are minimised. This is the single most significant difference between accident blackspot work and road safety audit. One process aims to reduce the number of accidents at an existing site, the other aims to prevent the very first accident from ever happening! Whilst accident reduction work continues to be a major component, accident prevention - via road safety audit - is now a part of the road design process in Australia and New Zealand. AUSTROADS (1994) defines road safety audit as - "a formal examination of an existing or future road or traffic project, or any project which interacts with road users, in which an independent, qualified examiner reports on the project's accident potential and safety performance." Belcher and Proctor (1993) explain that safety audit works in two ways to ensure that safety is improved - firstly by removing preventable accident producing elements (such as inappropriate intersection layouts) at the design stages, and secondly by mitigating the effects of remaining problems by the inclusion of suitable accident-reducing elements (such as anti-skid surfacing and crash barriers). Austroads stages of audit The earlier in the design process that a road safety audit takes place the more likely it is to be able to effectively influence safety in that scheme. The AUSTROADS project recognised this and developed a five stage audit process with emphasis on early intervention, namely: Feasibility Stage:- By providing a specific safety input at the feasibility stage of a scheme, road safety audit can influence fundamental issues such as route choice, standards, impact on and continuity with the existing adjacent network, and intersection or interchange provision. Draft Design Stage:- This audit occurs on completion of the preliminary road design. Typical considerations will include horizontal and vertical alignments, and intersection layouts. Subsequent significant changes in road alignment become much harder to achieve after this stage as land acquisition and other associated legal matters become finalised. Detailed Design Stage:- This audit occurs on completion of the detailed road design but before the preparation of contract documents. Typical considerations include geometric layout, linemarkings, signals, lighting, signing, intersection details, clearances to roadside objects (crash barriers/frangibility,) and provision for vulnerable road users. Attention to detail at this design stage can do much to reduce the costs and disturbances associated with last minute changes which may otherwise be brought about with a Pre-Opening Stage audit. It is cheaper and easier to change some marks on a drawing than to re-build/rectify a hazardous treatment. Pre-Opening Stage:- This audit involves a detailed inspection of a new scheme prior to its opening. The new road is driven, ridden and walked (when appropriate) by the auditor (or audit team) to ensure that the safety needs of all road users are provided for. A night time inspection is particularly important to check signing, delineation and other darkness-related issues. The Audit of Existing Roads:- This audit aims to ensure that the safety features of a road are compatible with the functional classification of the road, and to identify any feature which may develop over time into a safety concern. This stage of audit has been open to much debate in recent times, amid concerns that too much attention to this stage may lead to disillusionment when funds cannot meet the costs necessary to improve all the safety deficiencies. This debate will continue for some time, and in a era of restricted budgets the best advice is to be selective in having audits undertaken on existing roads. One option is to have a remedial budget set before the audit is done, and to ask the audit team to prioritise the work up to that limit. |
By Mr. N. Rosmuller
Introduction Especially in those Western European countries which intend to be leading in distribution and transportation, the ever increasing lack of space is a fast growing problem. However, in addition to space consumption, transportation activities and transportation systems bring about numerous other negative external effects, such as landscape fragmentation, noise, smell and risks. Protecting rural regions from these negative external effects has been the reason why several European countries have included ‘clustering’ as one of the main designing and aligning principles in the development of additional transportation systems. Clustering means that transportation systems are being traced immediately parallel to another. Clustering has gain its popularity because it is suppose to concentrate or even reduce negative environmental impacts of transportation activities and transport systems. However, after a closer look, it can be seen that clustering results in new kinds of complex and tightly coupled systems. Especially from a safety point of view, this increasing complexity is worrying. This paper is meant to find out whether or not the clustering of highways to other kinds of transportation systems affects safety levels. Therefore, physical and functional aspects of clustered transportation systems are addressed (chapter 2). Subsequently, in chapter 3, the fundamental components of risk analysis are addressed, as they are accident scenarios (what can happen?), consequences (if it happens, what are the consequences?) and frequencies (how likely is that this will happen?). In chapter 4, these risk analysis components are examined for clustered highways. After identifying clustering related accident scenarios, the accident frequencies and consequences of clustered highways segments are compared to accident frequencies and consequences of not-clustered, or singular, highway segments. This comparison is based upon an empirical highway accident data. In chapter 5, main conclusions are drawn, and as a result, some directions for further research are proposed. 2. Clustered transportation systems The essence of clustering transportation systems is that transportation systems are being traced immediately and parallel to another. From a physical point of view, clustered transportation systems know five characteristics, namely [Rosmuller, 1997a]:
Using a front-view, four of these five physical clustering aspects are visualized in figure 1 below. Only the longitudinal distance is not visible in this figure. In this figure a railway and a highway have been aligned in two arrangements near a residential area. The arrows indicate some of the potential risks from both highway and railway traffic to each other and the residential area.
Figure 1: Physical aspects of transport corridors and possible risks.
Physical aspects of clustering are relevant, but in respect to safety, even more relevant are the resulting functional aspects of clustering. Here, transportation systems are functionally limited in two ways, namely:
a) kind of transportation systems; because the focus in this research is on transporting people and goods, electric power-wires are excluded for further research. Because the research focus is on clustering, airways are excluded for further research. Airways, except for the runway parts, are not spatially clustered to other kinds of transportation systems. This implies highways, railways, waterways and pipelines remain for further research.
b) scale of transportation systems; the focus is on nation’s major transportation infrastructures because safety and risks are generally an integral part of impact assessments for such main infrastructures. This means that for example streets in villages, ditches or distribution pipelines are excluded from the research.
By clustering transportation systems, large scale and complex infrastructure configurations originate, for which various authors currently articulated there concerns in respect to safety and risk [Thissen, 1993, Stoop and Van der Heijden, 1994]. These concerns regard aspects as clustering may originate unknown accident mechanisms, increased accident frequencies, underestimated accident consequences and eventually capacity problems for emergency response organizations. Here, various issues arise, however of prime importance is whether or not evidence exists for the above described safety and risk concerns as a result of clustering.
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Normal Behaviour and Traffic Safety:
Violations, Errors, Lapses and Crashes TOKYO, JAPAN, OCTOBER 21 - 22, 1998 By: Stephen G Stradling1, Dianne Parker1, Timo Lajunen1 , Michelle L Meadows2 & Cheng Qiu Xie1
1Department of Psychology, The University of Manchester, UK; Abstract This paper summarises recent work by the Manchester Driver Behaviour Research Group. In a number of national questionnaire studies in the UK we have identified a threefold typology of aberrant driving behaviours, distinguishing
This work has been replicated in Australia, Sweden and China, and data is currently being collected in Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Holland and Finland. In the UK, drivers’ scores on Violations, not Errors or Lapses, are statistically associated with their three-year crash involvement, both retrospectively and prospectively, and for both Active Crashes ("I hit ... ") and Passive Crashes ("I was hit by ..."). Violations are more frequent amongst young drivers, male drivers, and high mileage drivers.
The consequences of these findings for road safety countermeasures will be briefly discussed, noting the need to change drivers’ attitudes. Psychological Factors in Crash Involvement Ever since the ground-breaking accident investigations two decades ago by Barbara Sabey (Sabey & Taylor, 1980), road-safety countermeasure policy and design have been driven by the much quoted finding that ‘65% of automobile accidents are wholly as a result and up to 95% of automobile accidents are at least partly as a result of human error’. This suggests that the situation may be improved by reducing opportunity for driver error: typically by concentrating on and improving the skills component of initial driver training and of any subsequent remedial re-training. However, while driving is clearly a skill-based activity, there is now a general consensus emerging that there is more to driving well - and to remaining crash-free - than technical competence. As US expert Patricia Waller noted recently: Passing a skills test is not related to subsequent crashes for motorcyclists (Taylor & Lockwood, 1990), and there is little evidence that a skills test can screen out unsafe drivers (West & Hall, 1997). Likewise, in a review of the German literature, Noordzij (1990) found that, while a certain minimal level of skill is necessary for driving, higher levels of skill are no guarantee that the skill be used appropriately. This finding is consistent with the finding in the US that race car drivers, who are acknowledged to be highly skilful drivers, actually have worse on-the-road driving records, taking other relevant variables into account (Williams & O’Neill, 1974). Some skill is essential, but the relationship between skill and driving performance is not linear. (Waller, 1997, p.197). The view we have been developing through our research in Manchester, England is that driving is not just a skill-based, but also a rule-governed and an expressive activity. Becoming a driver certainly involves mastering the technical skills of vehicle handling and positioning, but it also involves learning the rules (both formal and informal) required to ‘read the road’ and anticipate hazards, and constraining the expression within a social context of those individual preferences which may bring immediate gratification to one driver whilst placing others at risk. Within the last decade there has been considerable research into the social psychology of driving: looking at the beliefs, values, attitudes, evaluations, motivations, personality traits, etc., of crash-involved car drivers. Figure 1 provides a summary of this body of research (Lajunen, 1997; Meadows & Stradling, in press)
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More information concerning Traffic Safety can be found in the Urban Mobility library and headline module.
For example: