The International Road Assessment Programme

19 March 2007

The international Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) has been created to help improve road infrastructure safety in low and middle income countries in order to drive down the global road death toll.

http://www.irap.net

The aims of iRAP are strategic:

• To drive the upgrading of the safety performance of routes and networks where large numbers are killed and seriously injured
• To generate and prioritise large, affordable, high return programmes of safety engineering countermeasures using a globally consistent methodology
• To operate on a scale that is cost-efficient and can be project managed to deliver reductions in the cost of death and crippling injury as measured by Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) that are economically significant
• To implement performance tracking so that funding agencies are able to track outcomes and outputs and enable continuous global improvement in safety performance
• To provide the training, manuals and web tools to build quality and sustain national capabilities.

The first phase of iRAP is an 18-month pilot programme that began in April 2006. In this programme the global iRAP team are working through local clubs, and with governments and local agencies, to conduct road inspections across three continents. The team consists of the core iRAP team and three regional RAP teams:

usRAPLatin America. The team consists of the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety are leading work in South and (AAFTS), MidWest Research Institute (MRI), the Catalan motoring club of Spain (RACC), Iowa State University (ISU) and the Costa Rican motoring club (ACCR)

EuroRAP leads work in Africa. The team consists of EuroRAP AISBL, Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), the German motoring club ADAC, and the South African motoring Club AASA

The team consists of the ARRB Group (formerly the Australian Road Research Board ARRB), the Australian Automobile Association (AAA), and the Malaysian motoring club (AAM).