Safety Inspections as Supporting Tool for Safety Management of Low-Volume Roads

Road safety inspections (RSIs) are becoming an accepted practice in many agencies around the world. A safety assessment procedure based on safety inspections that can be used as a supporting tool in the safety management of low-volume rural roads is presented. From the procedure, a safety index (SI) that quantitatively measures the relative safety performance of a road segment is calculated. The RSIs carried out according to the defined procedures showed that, for the majority of the safety issues, there was a statistically significant level of agreement on the ranking of the issues produced by different inspectors. Further, the SI was assessed in 30 segments of two-lane rural roads, and rankings performed according to the SI scores and according to the empirical Bayes (EB) safety estimates were compared. This comparison showed a good correlation between SI and EB estimates. The results from the Spearman's rank correlation analysis provide additional validation of the procedure, indicating that the rankings from the SI scores and the EB estimates agreed at the 99.9% level of significance. The SI can be assessed as part of the safety inspection process without relevant supplementary work. The low cost and applicability in road networks where geometric and crash data are not available make the procedure very attractive for low-volume roads.