Road user audit

Although Road Safety Audit does look at scheme design from the road user s point of view, it is not in fact a road user audit - which aims to ensure that each road user has been adequately catered for within a scheme. The Highways Agency has recently published a Standard describing how to undertake Non-Motorised User Audits. ... 

Road Safety Audit considers the safety of all road users and in particular vulnerable road users such as the visually and mobility impaired, cyclists, pedestrians, equestrians, motorcyclists, children and the elderly. 

Road Safety Audit has to consider all road users... 

The Road Safety Audit should be looked at from all road users perspectives. 

In February 2005 the Highways Agency published a new Standard related to non-motorised user (NMU) audits. This Standard makes NMU audits mandatory on trunk road schemes. The audit is a check on the needs of the following road users ... 

The audits are to be carried out by members of the design team who have knowledge of the needs of the non-motorised road users. The standard sets out the way in which the audits are carried out at different stages of design. 

There could be concern that Road Safety Audit adds unnecessarily to the cost of a scheme and lengthens the time for the scheme to proceed towards implementation. On the other hand, highway authorities have spent considerable sums on remedial treatments to road schemes less than five years old, resulting in inconvenience, delay and added risk to road users. 

A Road Safety Audit tries to identify potential road safety problems and to suggest ways in which these identified problems can be minimised. The UK Highways Agency (HA) standard HD 19/15 suggests that issues to be investigated include collisions between vehicles, collisions between vehicles and vulnerable road users, and situations in which road users could trip or fall on the highway (HA, 2015). 

In 2008, the IHT in conjunction with Lancashire County Council and TMS Consultancy developed a series of interactive checklists. These are still available to Road Safety Auditors through the Lancashire County Council website (Lancashire County Council, 2014). The checklists enable auditors to choose a scheme type from a menu, together with the appropriate stage of Road Safety Audit. This selection generates a comment based on the most common safety issues identified for that scheme type and audit stage. These comments were derived from research similar to that undertaken to produce Chapter 6 of this book. In addition to the comment , the interactive checklist identifies the main road user affected, provides collision control data where available, and provides design advice from published documents that could assist with recommendations. 

These documents define what is meant by infrastructure projects and highway improvements , to make it clear what sort of schemes are subject to Road Safety Audits. For example, HD 19/15 permits schemes that have no impact on road users behaviour, and some Uke-for-Uke maintenance replacements, to be exempt. 

In 2012, the MPW commissioned an in-service Road Safety Audit project to serve as a demonstration project, highlighting the concept and process of Road Safety Audits. It was intended that the project should identify and demonstrate the benefits of Road Safety Audit and how the development and implementation of a Road Safety Audit policy and procedure in Kuwait could improve the overall level of road safety for road users. 

For most DOTs and local road agencies in the USA, Road Safety Audits are not carried out on the majority of schemes they are carried out on a relatively small percentage of the schemes that are considered most at risk from a user safety standpoint, or most able to benefit from the results of the audit. Since 2010, many state DOTs have adopted policies that integrate Road Safety Audits into their safety programmes and project development processes, although not for all projects. Some state DOTs and local agencies focus application of Road Safety Audits on resurfacing, restoration or rehabilitation (3R) projects that otherwise would not emphasise safety improvements. 

Since 2010, the FHWA with the state DOTs and other local agencies have expanded the apphcation of Road Safety Audits to focus on specific emphasis areas. These are areas where safety considerations, features or guidelines were not as well addressed historically as for motor vehicle users. Also, new technologies have emerged to facilitate more comprehensive application of Road Safety Audits. 

Quality audit is a process where a number of discrete audits are carried out on the design of a scheme and are then considered together to determine how best to take a scheme forward to construction. The process should allow the local authority to assess the competing needs of different groups of road user in a structured way. 

There is almost certainly no definitive collision research into this topic, as the STATS19 form used by the police to record injury collisions does not report on the visual acuity of a pedestrian involved in a collision, and does not record details of any tactile paving present. The Road Safety Audit is therefore more likely to be an intuitive approach in which the safety needs of each user are role played in relation to likely conflicts that could arise. The need to audit what you see rather than audit based on stereotypical or hypothetical concerns is really important here. 

Road Safety Auditors may well be asked to carry out Road Safety Audits on schemes designed and implemented outside their own country. TMS Consultancy has carried out Road Safety Audits in several European countries, and is currently involved in Road Safety Audits in the Middle East. Not only do other countries have different design standards but there are often different road user characteristics, for example ... 

This book has described the steps that Road Safety Auditors take when carrying out their work on new road schemes. The main objective of the Road Safety Audit is to answer the question Who can be hurt here, and why The auditor then needs to determine the answer to What can be improved here, to help road users to cope with the new road environment ... 

We are often asked to describe the contribution Road Safety Audit can make to road safety. It is a difficult question to answer, as quantifying the benefits of a process that intervenes before anything is built is not easy to do. Road Safety Audit is primarily about road users -trying to answer the question Who can be hurt here, and why So in that sense it is about people - people who design schemes, people who ultimately use those schemes and, of course, the people who audit the schemes. 

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