SAFESTAR - Safety Standards for Road Design and Redesign
Overview
Background & policy context:
The level of road safety for the Trans-European Roadway Network (TERN) that links major European centres is, to a large extent, determined by features and design of the road transport infrastructure. Road design is
understood to be a complex task which requires different skills, such as principal traffic engineering techniques, knowledge about driver behaviour and consistency with an underlying design philosophy. In the past, most road design philosophies have been based on a mix of best practice and research findings in the field. Explicit design strategies combining the idea of a 'sustainable, safe traffic and transport system' with the technical goal of 'relation design' are anticipated to improve the soundness and safety of future road design.
Objectives:
SAFESTAR aimed to gain more in-depth knowledge about the underlying principles of road planning and design in order to carry out an effective safety policy at the European level.
The main objectives of SAFESTAR were:
- The main objectives of SAFESTAR were: to select an advanced tunnel design, that would be tested in a driving simulator;
- to survey the dangers of so-called express roads and to provide recommendations for their future design;
- to evaluate the differences in cross-sections based on the evaluation of accident characteristics, and to select promising corrective measures;
- to increase knowledge about the design of curves for rural roads and its impact on safety, based on the evaluation of speed profiles and accident frequency;
- to improve calculation models used to predict accident levels for newly built junctions; and
- to perform safety audits in order to assess pre-construction safety levels in road design, evaluating several design procedures in different countries.
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