New guidelines to assess safety of road infrastructure in Europe

16 January 2023

The European Commission is making available guidelines on methodology for network-wide road safety assessments. Although not mandatory, these guidelines aim to help public authorities in EU Member States to carry out the safety assessments of their road networks as required under the Road Infrastructure Safety Management DirectiveSearch.

The guidance documents comprises a framework addressing both a reactive (accident based) and a proactive (feature based) safety assessment, covering issues such as the lane width, road curvature, design of junctions, roadside layout and potential conflicts between motorised vehicles and vulnerable road users. It also suggests a methodology for a common safety rating system for classification of the existing road network which should allow to rate each road section according to a 5-level scale. This would enable authorities to identify priorities for future actions and investment to address road safety concerns.

The guidelines and additional information is available here.