Transportation Engineering

Road Safety Engineering

Lecture 26

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 Context
• “The only kind of improvement we can hope to make
in the road accident situation is to reduce probabilities.
• We can aim to make it less likely that a motorist will
have an accident; or less likely that he will be badly
hurt when he does.
• But short of closing the roads we cannot eliminate the
risk completely, any more than we can in any other
walk of life.
• The problem therefore boils down to an assessment
of risk. We can judge any suggestion only by asking
what it will do to the odds.”
• Skillman, 1965
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 Context
• Transportation professionals and
others make decisions which
affect people’s safety.
• When a road is built to certain
standards, or an intersection is
upgraded, the frequency and
severity of crashes are affected.
• Professionalism requires that the
safety consequences of such
decisions be known.
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 Context
• But …Factual knowledge of road safety implications
are hard to come by.
• There is widespread belief that personal experience as
a driver, pedestrian or engineer is a good source of
factual knowledge about road safety  This is
dangerously untrue!
• Just as the experience of one person or one physician
is of no use for determining the effect of smoking on
the incidence of lung cancer, so the experience of a
driver or a traffic engineer is insufficient to know the
safety effect of various infrastructure modifications.

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 Context
• One of the main sources of factual knowledge about
the effect of engineering measures on road safety is
the ‘Observational Before and After study’.
• This type of study involves the observations of crash
data, rather than observations ‘in the field’.

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 Context
• Road Safety is a critical component of traffic engineering
and plays a part in almost everything.
• Increasing number of vehicles, more people, stronger
economy  road safety challenge.

‘000 Registered
Vehicles

Fatalities

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 The Social Cost
• Each year around half a million people die and 10-
15 million are injured in road crashes.
• In 2006 it was conservatively estimated that the
cost of crashes in Australia was $18M (BTRE
2010).
• Road crashes contribute to approximately 2% of
deaths in Australia.
• 25 times higher death rate from circulatory
disease, 15 times higher from cancer.

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 The Social Cost
• However, road crashes are a major cause of
death for the 17-25 year old group,
particularly men.
• When total productive male working years
lost is considered, then road fatalities
become of the same order of the cost of
both heart disease and all forms of cancer.

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 Nominal and Substantive Safety
• No road can ever be made ‘safe’, only safer
or less safe.
• Two definitions for ‘working safety’ for a
road network:
• Nominal Safety – level deemed appropriate
by current practitioners (standards, etc).
• Substantive Safety – matter of degree and is
derived from the count of crashes taking
place and their severity (performance).
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 Nominal and Substantive Safety
• Road safety practitioners in Australia
are trying to move their current
concepts of nominal safety as close to
absolute safety as possible, but their
success will always be measured in
terms of substantive safety of the
system.

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 Multidisciplinary
• Road safety involves a large range of
professionals:
– Police
– Psychologists
– Engineers
– Planners
– Lawyers
– Designers
– Community
– Everyone ...
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 Crash Rates
• Broad crash rates can be measured in terms of:
– Fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles
– Fatalities per 100,000 population (as measure of public
health)
– Fatalities per 100 million vehicle kilometres travelled
(exposure rate)
• This type of macro assessment is useful for
regions, countries, areas, etc.

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We have come a long way …

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We have come a long way …

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We have come a long way …

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 Causing Factors
• Causes of crashes can be attributed to
– Road User
– Vehicle
– Road
• Often a combination of the above
• Above system is inherently unstable and is kept in
equilibrium only by frequent intervention by the
human.
• Knowledge of human performance, capabilities
and behavioural characteristics is essential as a
prerequisite for detailed road safety assessment.
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 Causing Factors
• Vehicles – much work has been done to minimise
consequences of crashes (seat belts, airbags, crumple
zones, etc). Also reduce occurrence of crash (ABS, ITS,
warning devices, electronic stability control, etc)
• Road Users – most resistant to change. Major
contributing factor to crash rates. Publicity campaigns, law
enforcement, education, etc.
• Road – Core of Road Safety Engineering. Treatment of
hazardous locations, Road Safety Audits, Development of
design standards, etc. Focus of this part of the course.

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 Guiding Factors
• Road safety is driven by a number of factors
including:
– Public expectations
– Political will (road safety strategies, etc)
– Increasing awareness
– Economic factors (funding, reducing hospital
admissions, insurance, etc)

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 Defining the Problem
• UK Department of Transport defines an accident
(crash) as a:
• “rare, random, multi-factor event always
preceded by a situation in which one or more
persons have failed to cope with their
environment”
• A systematic approach combines elements of pre-
crash, in-crash and after-crash to form what is
known as the Haddon Matrix
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 Haddon Matrix

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Human Response

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 Human Response
• Expectancy. Prior driving experience results in a set of
expectancies for the driving task.
• Continuation expectancy. This is the expectation that the
events of the immediate past will continue. It results, for
example, in small headways, as drivers expect that the
preceding vehicle will not suddenly change speed.
• Event expectancy. This is the expectation that events
which have not happened will not happen. It results, for
example, in disregard for railway crossings and perhaps for
minor intersections as well, because drivers expect that no
hazard will present itself where none has been seen before.

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 Human Response
• Temporal expectancy. This is the expectation that
where events are cyclic (eg. Traffic signals), the
longer a given state occurs, the greater the
likelihood that change will occur. This is of course
a perfectly reasonable expectation, but it can result
in inconsistent responses.
• Driver behaviour is largely governed by habit,
experience and expectations.

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 Reaction Time
• Information takes time to process. “Reaction time” is
used to describe the period between the occurrence or
appearance of a ‘signal’ and the driver’s physical reaction
to it. (Garber and Hoel, 1988)
1. Perception: the use of vision capabilities to see a visual
signal.
2. Identification: the driver identifies the signal and thus
understands the stimulus.
3. Emotion: the driver decides what action to take in
response to the stimulus.
4. Volition: during which the driver actually executes the
action decided upon.
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 Road Safety Engineering
• Road engineering, (or Road Design) can have a dramatic
effect on road safety - a modern freeway can be 10 times
safer per vehicle kilometre than an undivided 2-lane road,
for example.
• Road design, construction, maintenance and management
all contribute to safety. However, the costs of this are high,
and interestingly the adoption of high road design
standards can rarely be justified on safety grounds alone.
• Safety benefits are typically of the order of 15 per cent of
the total benefits of an urban road project and 5 per cent of
the benefits of a rural road project - although since benefits
usually outweigh costs by 4 or 5 to one, safety benefits are
considerable (Lay, 1986)
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 Road Safety Engineering
• Road safety engineering may be defined as:
“A process, based on analysis of road and
traffic related accident information, which
applies engineering principles in order to
identify road design or traffic management
improvements that will cost-effectively
reduce the cost of road accidents.”

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 Road Safety Engineering
• Some specific road-oriented safety programs
include:
– Road design,
– Intersection design and control,
– Delineation, lighting and signing,
– Road construction and maintenance,
– Roadside hazard management,
– Traffic management (including traffic calming),
– Speeds and speed limits, and
– Treatments directed at vulnerable road users.
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 Delineation
• Most information which the driver requires to guide,
operate and control the vehicle is visual. Road system
must provide adequate visual information to enable
driver to control and navigate the vehicle.
• Roadway delineation is used to (Freedman, et al, 1988):
– Control the placements and movements of vehicles by supplying visual
information to the driver that identifies the safe and legal limits of the
travelled way.
– Regulate the direction of travel, lane changing and overtaking.
– Mark lanes or zones where manoeuvres such as turns or parking are
permitted, required or restricted.
– Improve lane discipline, particularly during night time driving.
– Aid in identifying potentially hazardous situations such as obstacles and
pedestrian crossings.
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 Crash Investigation
• From a road safety engineering perspective, the
purpose of crash investigations is to determine the
factors involved in crash(s) so that appropriate
road or traffic engineering remedial or
preventative measures may be applied.
• Often there is a parallel activity undertaken by the
police aimed at determining fault (in a legal sense)
so that charges can be laid against a guilty party.
Unfortunately, the aims and intentions of the
police and the road safety engineer are not the
same and are often in conflict.
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 Crash Investigation
• Crash investigations are carried out in three levels.
1. Analysis of mass crash data. Identifies crash ‘black spots’,
trends at high crash locations, etc.
2. Collection of supplementary data. Gain a better
understanding of a specific crash type, causing factors, etc.
3. In-depth multi disciplinary investigation involving detailed
crash scene data. May involve range of disciplines such as
medicine, police, traffic engineer, forensics, etc.

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 Safe Systems Approach
• The Safe System approach recognises that, even
with the best preventive programs in place, road
crashes will still occur – and aims to build a road
system that offers maximum protection to all users
by providing safer road infrastructure, increasing
the proportion of safe vehicles on our roads and
improving the safe behaviour of road users by
targeting areas such as speeding, drink and drug
driving, fatigued driving and driver distraction.

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 Safe Systems Approach
• Safe Systems
approach has origins Safer Speed
in Sweden and has
now been adopted Human
by other countries Tolerance
(including the Safer Safer
Roadside
Netherlands) as well Vehicles
Environment
as some states of
Australia (including
Tasmania &
Victoria)
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 Safe Systems Approach
• The Safe Systems Approach includes:
– Designing and maintaining roads and roadsides to reduce
risk to as low as reasonably practical
– Setting speed limits according to the safety of the road
and roadside
– Advising, educating and encouraging road users to
comply with road rules, be unimpaired and alert, and drive
according to the prevailing conditions
– Encouraging consumers to purchase safer vehicles with
primary safety features that reduce the likelihood of a
crash, such as electronic stability control, and secondary
safety features that reduce injury in a crash, such as side
curtain airbags.
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Safe Systems - Detail

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 Safer Vehicles
• The car has evolved ...

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 Safe Systems Approach
• The success of the Safe System approach is
dependent on road users acting within the
limits of the system’s design.
• Hence the importance given to ensuring the
community becomes more aware of the risks
associated with road travel and that people are
able to make better informed decisions on
issues such as vehicle choice, speed and
behaviour.KNE314 Transportation Engineering
The Role of Infrastructure

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 Crash Data
• Crash data analysis example.

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