Audits

Black Spots and Road Safety Audits

ACRS Policy Position

All jurisdictions should place a high priority on funding 'black spot' programs to eliminate road and road environment hazards.   Preventative safety interventions such as road safety audits should be applied to all new road design and construction.

Objective

To improve the intrinsic safety of the road system and road environment, and thus reduce the consequences of driver error

Discussion

'Black Spot' programs funded by the Federal Government and by States and Territories have made a significant contribution to road safety since first applied in the early 1990s. Black spot programs analyse crash data to identify locations where there have been significant numbers of crashes, allocating priorities based on benefit cost ratios and applying treatments to reduce crashes and crash consequences.   These treatments have typically resulted in very high cost benefits and made a significant contribution to the reduction in road trauma.

One of the benefits of black spot programs is the rigorous approach to identifying and prioritising locations for treatment based on actual crash incidence and benefit cost ratios derived from the cost of road trauma compared to the cost of road or road environment treatments.   This ensures that the funds applied to treatment of 'bad' locations are applied to the best effect.

As these programs reach maturity and the number of locations requiring treatment diminishes, emphasis may need to shift toward predictive models of hazard identification.

A companion technique is the road safety audit, in which hazardous features in the road and road environment are identified and treatments applied.  

However, road safety audits have potentially a more important role at the planning and design stage.   This principle recognises several things: 

• the requirement for safety to be a key performance outcome in designing road and traffic systems;
• the need to create forgiving environments that reduce the capacity for and consequences of human error
• avoiding the costs of remedial treatment
• designing and building for safety, accepting perhaps some up-front costs rather than transferring them to future users
• looking beyond design standards.