Advances in Proactive Road Safety Planning

There are two main transportation engineering approaches to improving road safety: reactive and proactive. The traditional reactive approach consists of implementing the necessary improvements to existing hazardous (black-spot) sites in order to improve safety at these sites. The proactive approach is a collision prevention approach that tries to prevent unsafe road conditions from occurring in the first place. While the traditional reactive approach has proven to be very successful, it requires that a significant collision history exist before any action is taken to address the road safety problem. Moreover, retrofitting countermeasures in reaction to problems in existing road networks can be costly. Therefore, there is a need for transportation professionals to take a proactive approach that addresses road safety problems before they are allowed to emerge. There is a growing appreciation in the road safety community for the need to implement a more proactive approach to road safety. Geometric design guides in many countries now present explicit relationships between road design decisions and safety consequences, moving road engineering away from reliance on minimum standards without regard to safety. The focus of this paper is on proactive engineering initiatives that can be employed to improve road safety. An overview of emerging trends in proactive road safety planning will be provided. These emerging trends include: the use of safety conscious planning models, the explicit evaluation of safety in road design, and the automated safety analysis of video data.