10. Assessing Potential Risks and Identifying Issues

Key messages

• Assessment of risk should be undertaken for the entire road network for which the road agency is responsible. In many countries, a small percentage of roads account for a large percentage of deaths and serious injuries. At programme level, the task is to identify such routes and address these as a priority.
• There are established approaches for identifying high risk crash locations – but training of key staff is required.
• For existing road networks, where data is available, assessment of crash data should be undertaken to identify high risk locations (where data is available). To identify crash based locations good crash data is required.
• Proactive approaches should also be adopted – especially for major road corridors – including impact assessment, road safety audit, safety inspection, and road assessment programmes.
• Where crash data is not available, these proactive approaches must be adopted while collection of crash data commences.
• Proactive approaches should be used in combination with crash data where this is available. This combination of approaches provides a full assessment of road safety risk.