An Integrated Design Framework for Safety Interventions on Existing Urban Roads-Development and Case Study Application

Abstract

The need for improving urban road safety, livability, and sustainability is evident.Quantitative estimates and qualitative methods/strategies can be used by road safety practitionersto design safety interventions. This study proposes a flexible integrated design framework forsafety interventions on existing urban road segments and intersections that integrates quantitativeand qualitative methods. The proposed design framework is divided into four stages of the safetymanagement process: End of Network Screening, Diagnosis, Selection of Countermeasures, andEconomic Assessment. Pilot applications of the proposed method were performed on existing roadsof the urban road network of the Municipality of Bari, Italy. Results from the application wereuseful to highlight some possible problems in the different stages of the design process. In particular,the discussed problems include a lack of crash and traffic data, difficulties with defining the roadfunctional classifications, including rural-to-urban transitions, a lack of local inspection procedures,the recurrent problems from diagnosis, difficulties regarding the safety assessment of cyclinginfrastructures and sight distances, the criteria for grouping countermeasures into sets, and the choiceof appropriate predictive methods. In response, appropriate solutions to the highlighted problemswere presented. The usefulness of the proposed method for both practitioners and researcherswas shown.