A survey to assess the likelihood of fatal and serious injuries when accidents occur on many of Britains busiest inter-urban roads is underway, says The AA Motoring Trust. Once complete, a star-rating system will indicate to drivers in an instantly-recognisable way how dangerous an unfamiliar road is.
Under the EuroRAP Road Protection Score (RPS) scheme, main roads between large towns and cities will be given a score, from zero to four stars. This mirrors the system used by the Euro New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP) to transform safety protection in cars over the past 10 years.
Assessment is being carried out by a team from the German motoring organisation ADAC, co-funded by The AA Motoring Trust and the Highways Agency, with technical support from the UKs Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) and Swedish consultants SWECO. UK-based EuroRAP (European Road Assessment Programme) coordinates the pan-European RPS scheme, which is analysing 7,000 kilometres of roads in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in this major pilot survey.
In deciding a roads star rating, the road surveyors consider three main types of accident:
1 Head-on crashes: how well is traffic separated and what disincentives to over-taking along dangerous stretches of road are there?
2 Run-off crashes: how well are drivers protected against hitting rigid poles, signs, lampposts and trees or going down embankments if they leave the road?
3 Junction crashes: to what extent could a junction layout or the frequency of turnings contribute towards accidents?
We aim to find out if drivers in cars with five-star protection are running the gauntlet on roads with less than four stars, says Bert Morris, director of The AA Motoring Trust.
Just as the star-rating system for car crash protection has inspired manufacturers to transform the safety features of cars in the UK, so EuroRAP RPS will encourage road authorities to innovate and upgrade safety features on many of Britains persistently lethal roads.
Morris adds: The primary function of the Road Protection Scoring is not to safeguard extreme drivers who go hell for leather regardless of conditions, although their chances of survival will be enhanced by subsequent improvements. The scheme sets the benchmark at the level of average drivers who follow the rules of the road but make mistakes, perhaps because of bad weather or through not knowing the route. RPS shows how well a road will forgive or how badly it will punish an ordinary driver's error.
Road inspection programmes are well developed in Sweden and Germany, and programmes are now rolling out across Europe with developments in Britain,
Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
The process of star rating is encouraging the development of innovative engineering for "forgiving roads". The development of single carriageway main roads with central safety fencing and regular provision for protected overtaking is being taken forward in Sweden, Ireland and elsewhere.
Lattix posts, which crumple on being struck, are entering national road engineering standards. Safety fencing to prevent run-off accidents which is sufficiently environmentally appealing, even for use in national parks, is one of the innovations that has already begun to appear in Europe.
