Elements of Road Safety Engineering – Workshop Report

The workshop report on the elements of road safety engineering summarizes the CAREC Institute’s workshop of September 2019 and shares lessons and recommendations for future consideration.

The report emphasizes the benefits that traffic police and engineers can gain in cooperation when sharing resources and information. It narrates how to treat road safety as a business that requires investment to deliver significant returns, how “high crash frequency” locations can be investigated and treated with low cost countermeasures, how engineers can prevent crashes on new roads by applying the road safety audit process during planning, design, and construction, etc.

Details of a case study on blackspot investigation, where participants experienced learning by doing, are of particular interest. Further, the trainer and organizers share lessons to improve future workshop delivery.

Recommendations are provided to strengthen connections with national technical universities to assist the teaching staff to be better equipped to teach road safety engineering to their students. The network of national technical universities is proposed to become a platform for knowledge sharing and mentoring in road safety audits (including cross-border audits) for national road authorities. Moreover, the report proposes establishment of the national road auditor registration schemes, and enactment of national road audit policies. Development of the fourth manual on pedestrians is proposed to complement a set of CAREC road safety manuals, as there is a lot of interest to improve pedestrian safety.