Road Safety and resilience of rural areas

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Implementation of the NWRSA methodology for secondary rural roads;
• Innovative and effective enforcement strategies, incentive mechanisms and measures raising risk awareness for fostering safer behaviour;
• Prevention strategies for reducing road fatalities and serious road traffic injuries on rural roads along with the respective implementation guidelines and policy measures tailored to the responsible stakeholders (regional authorities, police, healthcare professionals, national governments, etc.);
• GIS-based application to assist local and regional authorities in identifying and mapping the impact of extreme weather phenomena and other natural disasters (such as floods, fires, storms, heavy snowfall etc.) on the safety and resilience of the road network in their jurisdiction.

Scope:

With more than 50% of all EU road fatalities occurring in rural areas along with evidence suggesting that crashes and crash-related fatalities in rural roads vary from those in urban roads or motorways, it is imperative to understand and mitigate the safety risks in rural roads in view of the EU’s ambition to move towards Vision Zero by 2050. Local and regional authorities have an important role to play to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries.

In the EU, the Road Infrastructure Safety Management (RISM) Directive introduced the concept of network-wide road safety assessment (NWRSA) and the concept of proactive road safety assessment through the understanding of the in-built safety of roads. Considering safety at the network-level allows for an overview of the road safety performance instead of focusing on isolated parts of it, while the in-built safety assessment aims to identify parts of the road that have been omitted by crash-based analyses (such crash clusters or hotspot analysis) as they do not concentrate the majority of crashes, yet are crash-prone and/or uncomfortable to navigate. According to the provisions of the RISM Directive, a methodology has been developed to assess the network-wide safety of motorways and primary rural roads based on their combined crash-based and in-built safety assessments. While this is a first step in understanding road safety conditions on rural roads, secondary and lower-class roads are not covered and, at the same time, there is not adequate information on road user behaviour.

In an ageing society, cognitive and physical impairments pose an increasing threat to safe mobility. In rural areas, people with any kind of impairment or disability often lack alternatives to driving a car for their mobility needs. Addressing these issues will not only enhance road safety but also improve the quality of life and prevent the social exclusion of these people.

In addition to road safety issues, local and regional authorities manage risks associated with extreme weather phenomena and other natural disasters like floods, fires, storms or heavy snowfall. As these may affect safety and operations, relevant authorities need to adopt a more holistic resilience monitoring and response.

Research should support addressing these challenges by undertaking all the following actions in at least three regions covering both primary and secondary rural roads of adequate length to allow for region-level comparisons:

• Demonstrate the practical applicability of the NWRSA methodology and expand its use to all rural roads for an easy, low-cost, flexible and transparent, yet sufficiently accurate assessment of road infrastructure safety. Identify information gaps and propose methods to leverage available data to supplement the understanding of crash causation and outcomes.
• Develop prevention strategies and measures to reduce fatalities and serious injuries in rural areas with a focus on high-risk locations and situations and on improving road user behaviour. This includes the development of reliable and easy-to-use methods to provide quantified indications of the actual crash risk associated with and the prevalence of risky behaviours. Based on this, enforcement measures with evidence-based effectiveness in addressing the problems and motivations underlying risky behaviour should be proposed, combining traditional methods with innovative enforcement approaches and new technologies, also taking into account the issue of multi-offenders[[ A small group of repeat offenders account for a large share of crashes (e.g. 5% in population vs. 27% in crashes according to SWOV 2017 Progressief boetestelsel) and intoxication by drugs ( Recent studies show that the share of crash-involved drivers intoxicated by drugs equals or even surpasses those intoxicated by alcohol [Gjerde & Forst 2023].]]. These enforcement measures, complemented by suitable awareness raising and nudging measures as well as novel incentive mechanisms to promote safe driving, will form building blocks to design integrated strategies fostering safer behaviour according to the local needs and specificities of rural areas. A gender and disability sensitive and intersectional approach, which intersects with other social factors, could be considered. Crash prevention strategies should also include countermeasures to reduce the effects of health-related risk factors and to guarantee at the same time the mobility of older people and persons with health impairments in rural areas.
• Develop tools to make knowledge about climate-related risks easily accessible to local authorities and to enable them to take appropriate actions in order to maintain road safety and the resilience of the rural road network and of the infrastructure for road users even in extreme conditions^[1].

Projects should select those regions ensuring diversity in terms of road network design, geography and climate conditions, and road safety culture. At least two of those regions should be in countries with higher percentage of fatalities on rural roads than the EU average. The involvement of road authorities is strongly recommended.

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[1] Such tools may be based on results from projects under HORIZON-CL5-2024-D6-01-11 (effects of disruptive changes in transport) as well as on other thorough analyses of how such situations were managed in the past and what can be improved.