Title: Improving the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users with Disabilities
Abstract: Even if moving is a basic human right, a truly safe, comfortable and accessible viable system for vulnerable road users, especially with disabilities, is a rare condition in the most part of urban areas. This paper presents how to obtain a preventive method for improving road safety for elderly and disabled people, which gives solutions that can be easily evaluated by project officials or managers, integrating two different techniques: the ‘Operational Safety Review’ and the ‘typical accident scenarios’. Road Safety Audit is a formal assessment of the safety of a future road; in the case of an existing road, this method is called ‘Operational Safety Review’ (OSR). This is a method of prevention of road accidents, which consists in an examination by an independent team of trained specialists, who assesses the crash potential and safety performance of a road and prepares a report that identifies potential safety problems, proposing improvements. The method of typical accident scenarios takes its origin from the black spots analysis. Reviewing all the Police reports of a certain type of accidents occurred in an area, they are classified in order to their temporal and casual development. Every group of accidents which have particular similarities constitutes a scenario, and for every scenario some solution are proposed. Moreover in the 1970’s the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started to type pedestrian crashes, from which some frequently occurring types of crashes have been extracted and countermeasures have been studied. In 2002 The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Research Program, striving to pave the way for a more walkable future, published “The Pedestrian Facilities Users Guide”, which is the culmination of results from the research conducted as part of the large study on walkable environments, pedestrian crashes and their countermeasures, and engineering improvements for pedestrians. The crash types and countermeasures of this guide can be used together with the French typical accident scenarios for the case of elderly and disabled, in order to can complete to the Italian database of vulnerable road users crashes, which is been formed. OSR should propose solutions to be realized in short and immediate time, through the implementation of checklists, which are used during the drive-/or walk-through as a memorandum of all the factors that might cause crashes. Since disabled and elderly people have some specific problems which often cause some types of crashes, integrating the two methods could be useful in order to have more detailed checklist and to obtain immediate countermeasures related to the crash type. Therefore technicians would have solutions, among which they could choose the most suitable ones. As a case study Brescia (an Italian town with about 200.000 inhabitants) have been chosen, for which several typical pedestrian accident scenarios are been created; moreover since 1991 the University of Brescia has been monitoring and mapping road accidents, developing a long experience about road safety in urban area and particularly about OSR and typical accident scenarios. The effectiveness of the integration of these two methods will be therefore proved through the creation of a database of typical accident scenarios with the solutions related, that the Public officials could easily manage.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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