In what ways is road safety being improved?

Friendly Stranger..

Here are the ways to improve road safety.

1. Developing a Road Safety Plan

A national medium or long term Road Safety Plan is a prerequisite for achieving sustainable improvements in road safety. The plan should set measurable long term and mid-term road safety targets, build capacity of local institutions, and provide alternative sources of financing for road safety measures.

2. Institutional Responsibility of Road Safety

Improving road safety requires the participation of many different organizations and sectors. No one sector working alone can effectively reduce the number of road casualties.

3. Monitoring and Evaluation

A simple but effective monitoring and evaluation system is required to track progress of road safety activities and to estimate the safety impact. For action plans in developing countries, initial focus is often on institutional strengthening and capacity building rather than just on reducing of casualties in numeric terms. Monitoring and evaluation systems established as part of implementing action plans and safety initiatives must therefore, where appropriate, be able to indicate progress towards achievement of institutional impact and developmental objectives.

4. Driver Training and Testing

With road user error contributing to the vast majority of road crashes, the development of safe drivers, skilled in defensive driving techniques, should be the primary objective of any road safety program. Driving examiners in developing countries are rarely given special training and driving tests an inadequate test of ability to drive safely in traffic on real roads

rapierlynx

There are three inter-related factors to road safety: The driver, the road, and the vehicle.

Driver safety is being improved by graduated licensing for young drivers, mandatory retesting of older drivers, and research in "human factors" to understand the limitations and capabilities of drivers. Human factors results are used in designing vehicles and roads to help drivers avoid mistakes.

New technologies being are used to make vehicles safer. Some, like electronic stability control and tire pressure monitoring, are more obvious than others. For example, Honda Accords are designed so the hood will pop upwards a few inches in a crash. In crashes with pedestrians, this provides a bit of a cushion between a pedestrian slamming onto the hood and the hard, unyielding engine below it.

A lot of research is going into roadway design and how it affects safety. We're actually getting to the point that we can enter a road's characteristics into a computer algorithm and predict how many crashes will happen there. Google "Highway Safety Manual," "NCHRP Report 500" and IHSDM for more details.

Other examples are roundabouts, which largely eliminate the head-on and right-angle crashes that plague conventional intersections, and energy absorbing guide rail ends that bring a car to a controlled stop rather than flipping it over or spearing it like a shish-kebab, the way older end sections did.

UCANTCME

1. New porous asphalt which actually keeps water off the surface and drains it to the side and reduces hydroplaning.

2. Grooved concrete aids traction, especially in wet weather.

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