Wire rope barrier effectiveness on Victorian roads

Unsafe roadsides contribute to a significant number of crashes on Victorian roads. In the five years to 2009, well over half of all fatal and serious injury crashes in rural Victoria, nearly 5,000 crashes, resulted from vehicles running off the road or being involved in head-on crashes (VicRoads data, 2010). More importantly, around 60 per cent of these involved hitting a roadside object. Wire rope barriers, or flexible barriers, are considered one of the most effective means of preventing such collisions based on international evaluations, but at the time of the study, no comprehensive evaluation had been undertaken on the effectiveness of this barrier in reducing such crashes on Victorian roads. An evaluation was completed by Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) and included 100 km of wire rope barrier. Results indicate that the barriers are associated with significant reductions in the risk of both casualty and serious casualty crashes, of up to 87 per cent on an individual route. This paper presents and discusses the results of the evaluation.