Improving Roadside Design to Forgive Human Errors

Accidents involving roadsides are typically extremely “unforgiving”. Even though the roadside design can affect only marginally the actual number of accidents occurring on a road, the severity of crashes can be considerably reduced if roadsides are designed to be more “forgiving”. Within the IRDES project a practical and uniform guideline that allows the road designer to improve the forgivingness of the roadside and a practical tool for assessing the effectiveness of applying a given roadside treatment have been produced for the following set of roadside features: barrier terminals; shoulder rumble strips; forgiving support structures for road equipment; shoulder width.