IRDES - Final Report

IRDES (Improving Roadside Design to Forgive Human Errors) is a research project of the cross-border funded joint research programme “ENR SRO1 – Safety at the Heart of Road Design”, which is a trans-national joint research programme that was initiated by “ERA-NET ROAD – Coordination and Implementation of Road Research in Europe” (ENR), a Coordination Action in the 6th Framework Programme of the EC. The funding partners of this cross-border funded Joint Research Programme are the National Road Administrations (NRA) of Austria, Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and United Kingdom. Each year 43,000 persons are fatally injured in Europe due to road accidents. The RISER project has shown that even though 10 percent of all accidents are single vehicle accidents (typically run-off-road (ROR) accidents) the rate of these events increases to 45 percent when only fatal accidents are considered. One of the key issues of this high ROR fatality rate is to be found in the design of the roadsides that are often “unforgiving”. CEDR has identified the design of forgiving roads as one of the top priorities within its Strategic Work Plan. For this reason, a specific Team dealing with Forgiving Roadsides has been established within the Technical Group (TG) on Road Safety of CEDR. A number of different studies have been conducted in recent years to design roadsides to forgive human errors, but there is still a need for: - A practical and uniform guideline that allows the road designer to improve the forgivingness of the roadside - A practical tool for assessing (in a quantitative manner) the effectiveness of applying a given roadside treatment The aim of the IRDES project is to produce these two outputs with specific reference to the following set of roadside features: - Barrier terminals - Shoulder rumble strips - Forgiving support structures for road equipment - Shoulder width. In addition a practical assessment tool was also developed for analysing the roadside treatments to be applied in high risk bends.