The IRAP road safety toolkit: a website-based approach to addressing road safety problems

The World Report on Traffic Injury Prevention (issued jointly by the World Health Organisation and the World Bank) drew attention to the urgent need for action to reduce road traffic injuries globally. Its key conclusion was that, in order to achieve safer roads, a 'Safe System' approach was needed. This means that a road system should be designed to accommodate, and compensate for, human vulnerability and frailty. An essential element of the Safe Systems approach is accurate and accessible information on the causes of crashes and possible solutions to the identified road safety problems. This paper presents an overview of the Road Safety Toolkit, which was developed by ARRB for iRAP (the International Road Assessment Programme) in association with the Global Transport Knowledge Partnership (gTKP). It is a free on-line tool that is designed to assist in the analysis of crashes, or issues relating to specific road user groups, and in the selecting of the most appropriate road safety engineering treatments. Where appropriate, the Toolkit also identifies non-engineering solutions, such as enforcement and road user education programs. Plans for future refinements in the Toolkit are also discussed.