Overview
There is a national and international demand for methods of estimating the effects and costs of road safety measures. In 2002, SWOV developed the Road Safety Explorer for Regions. This instrument has been applied in all regions and is worth further development. The first improvement involves a direct link with the National Road Network Database and with a GIS package. This offers possibilities of judging road safety measures at the level of road stretches, intersections, routes, and specific areas. The method is also being extended with the Sustainably-Safe meter, with which routes and networks can be quantitatively tested for their Sustainably-Safe level. Using this approach, SWOV can carry out research into the road safety influence of road and traffic characteristics.
The Road Safety Explorer provides insight into effects of costs of current and future packages of road safety measures, including the enforcement of vehicle measures. Its application area is not bound by a criterion. The Road Safety Explorer can also be used as monitoring instrument to, for example, keep an eye on a target.
The Road Safety Explorer is suitable for examining the cost-effectiveness of measures and for testing the sensitivity of assumptions about exposure, investments, and effects of measures on the number of crashes and casualties, and the crash rate per road type.
While improving the Road Safety Explorer, the following activities are involved:
- making the method suitable for road stretch, intersection, route, and area and connecting to GIS system and the National Road Network Database, including Road Features+;
- calculating crash rates for a baseline year and a prognosis year;
- determining effects of (new) measure packages and fitting into procedures;
- determining costs of (new) measure packages and fitting into procedures;
- designing a convenient and clear interface for users.
A separate improvement of the Road Safety Explorer is the introduction of the Sustainably-Safe meter. In 2003, the partially improved Road Safety Explorer is being applied in a test area. After 2003, the development of the Road Safety Explorer will proceed further, and then we will start to apply it in a larger area. This SWOV application takes place within the European RIPCoRD project.