Road safety assessments and road safety audits on the existing Abu Dhabi Internal road network

Abstract

Paper presented at the 31st Annual Southern African Transport Conference 9-12 July 2012 "Getting Southern Africa to Work", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

Road safety auditing is a process to pro-actively review the potential for road safety improvements on any road or transportation project, whether in a design phase or as an existing road facility. The process is based on the critical assessment of the project features as they would be experienced by any road user. ARRB Group Ltd (ARRB, the Australian Road Research Board) in co-operation with Parsons International Ltd (PIL) conducted road safety audits on a selection of the internal road network of the Municipality of Abu Dhabi City, UAE. The project was conducted in 2011 and consisted of various tasks: • Conducting a network level road safety assessment of 2 600 carriageway-km of roads and streets to identify high risk areas; • Conducting road safety audits on a sub-set of roads and streets of about 300 carriageway-km forming part of the high risk areas; • Recommending remedial measures; • Developing program level cost estimates for remedial treatments • Prioritising remedial treatments based on their cost effectiveness The network level road safety assessment had been conducted using the Hawkeye video survey system and the risk levels of different sections of the network determined by utilizing the proprietary NetRisk software. Available crash information was superimposed on maps showing the network risk levels. In this manner a clear impression could be formed of those areas where safety concerns existed, based on the pro-active review of road features in the road safety assessment process in coordination with the reactive process of crash analysis. Road safety audits were then conducted on the areas with the highest risk levels. The audits were undertaken by combining traditional on-site reviews with a comprehensive geo-referenced inventory of road safety problems extracted from the video surveys. A first order estimate of the cost of the works to remedy the safety concerns on the 300 carriageway-km of audited roads and streets indicated a programme value in excess of USD 93,5Million1 (at 2011 prices).