Road Safety and resilience of rural areas

Expected Outcome: Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes: Implementation of the NWRSA methodology for secondary rural roads; Innovative and effective enforcement strategies, incentive mechanisms and measures raising risk awareness for fostering safer behaviour; Prevention strategies for reducing road fatalities and serious road traffic injuries on rural roads along with the respective implementation guidelines and policy measures tailored to the responsible stakeholders (regional authorities, police, healthcare professionals, national governments, etc.); GIS-based application to assist local and regional authorities in identifying and mapping the impact of extreme weather phenomena and other natural disasters (such as floods, fires, storms, heavy snowfall etc.) on the safety and resilience of the road network in their jurisdiction. Scope: With more than 50% of all EU road fatalities occurring in rural areas along with evidence suggesting that crashes and crash-related fatalities in rural roads vary from those in urban roads or motorways, it is imperative to understand and mitigate the safety risks in rural roads in view of the EU’s ambition to move towards Vision Zero by 2050. Local and regional authorities have an important role to play to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries. In the EU, the Road Infrastructure Safety Management (RISM) Directive introduced the concept of network-wide road safety assessment (NWRSA) and the concept of proactive road safety assessment through the understanding of the in-built safety of roads. Considering safety at the network-level allows for an overview of the road safety performance instead of focusing on isolated parts of it, while the in-built safety assessment aims to identify parts of the road that have been omitted by crash-based analyses (such crash clusters or hotspot analysis) as they do not concentrate the majority of crashes, yet are crash-prone and/or uncomfortable to navigate. According to the provisions of the RISM Directive, a methodology has been developed to assess the network-wide safety of motorways and primary rural roads based on their combined crash-based and in-built safety assessments. While this is a first step in understanding road safety conditions on rural roads, secondary and lower-class roads are not covered and, at the same time, there is not adequate information on road user behaviour. In an ageing society, cognitive and physical impairments pose an increasing threat to safe mobility. In rural areas, people with any kind of impairment or …