Safety effects of road design standards

Proper road design is crucial to prevent human errors in traffic, and less human errors will result in less accidents. Since road design standards can play an important role in the process of designing roads it is worthwhile to find ways of increasing the impact of the safety aspect in future design standards. The paper examines to which degree road safety has been a criterion in drawing up road design standards in EU countries. As safety is among the factors that are mostly dealt with implicitly, the answer to this question is difficult to give. A more explicit treatment of safety is needed to be able to establish and to possibly increase the impact of safety in the standards. Some ways to achieve this area: working in the long term towards a sustainable-safe road network, based on a monofunctional road categorization; assuring a better connection between research results and standards; introducing a differentiation in the status of existing standards by more clearly distinguishing between regulations, guidelines, recommendations etc., on the basis of their respective effects on safety. Elaborating this last suggestion, a sound system of margins would also be of benefit, especially in view of the difficulties connected with international harmonization. Such a system would allow designers to depart from certain values; it must be accompanied by a set of well-founded instructions indicating when departures are tolerated. (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 882436. (For a fuller report with the same title by this author and others, see IRRD 866221).