Assessing the safety of routes in a regional network

In the Netherlands, the concept 'Sustainable Safety' is the leading vision in road safety policy and research. The main goal of a sustainably safe road transport system is to reduce the annual number of road crash casualties to a fraction of the current levels. An important requirement that follows from this vision is that the quickest route and the safest route should coincide. This paper focuses on the design of a method which enables the planner to establish the safety effects of existing route choice, and also those of changes in route choice. The traffic safety assessment is carried out by quantifying the safety level of a route on the basis of those characteristics of the route that are assumed to be related to safety. This paper examines the quantitative relationship between the assessment of the route's safety level and the conflicts (at junctions) involving vehicles travelling along that route. These conflicts are detected in a micro-simulation model. Different routes in a regional network which were travelled by the modeled vehicles were used for the analysis. This method of quantifying the safety level of routes will make it possible to evaluate road network structures from a safety perspective. It is expected that by optimising the design of the network and by influencing route choice a (more) sustainably safe traffic system can be achieved. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.