Application of an Innovative Network Wide Road Safety Assessment Procedure Based on Human Factors

Often the identification of critical road segments relies on accidents as primary data. Nevertheless, accidents data are sometimes prone to errors. Moreover, relying on accidents, means waiting for them to occur before intervening. A modern road administration must intervene before accidents occur to save lives. Furthermore, it is nowadays proven that drivers’ behaviour is the leading accident influencing factor. Thus, it is crucial to deepen the analysis of the road-driver interaction by means of application of human factors’ principles to road safety. This means to judge how much the road is perceived by the driver and influences their behaviour. This helps to identify which are the triggering factors of accidents. This paper proposes a new analysis procedure which allows to make a network safety assessment and screening considering the human factors aspects. The process relies on road visual surveys and evaluations which allows to make a more detailed and proactive analysis of the road. Furthermore, the data required to implement the analysis are few and this makes it suitable to use also when data are hardly available (e.g., low- and middle-income countries). The paper presents the application of the procedure to three different road stretches of a total length of about 38 kms: one in Italy, one in Germany and one in Slovenia. The application of the procedure demonstrates that it can be easily applied by Human Factors trained inspector and that it may provide a ranking of the network suitable to identify the most critical section of the network.