22-01-2013, 11:08 AM
Accidents on rural roads – for better or worse
ABSTRACT
Single-carriageway A-roads in rural areas are the most dangerous routes on the highway network. Alongside journey time savings, safety improvements are one of the main benefits claimed to result from quality improvements to rural single carriageway roads.
Existing appraisal methods support the engineers natural conviction that a better-designed road is a safer road. However, this contrasts with anecdotal evidence that as road improvements lead to increases in speeds and traffic flow, the likelihood of a fatal accident increases.
This paper examines the statistics to address the safety issue in detail – does improving these roads make them safer, or not ? Are the claimed safety benefits well-founded ?
A novel analysis is presented of accident data on the National Secondary Road network in Ireland. The Irish national secondary network consists of 2,700 km of single carriageway A-roads, complementing the national primary routes. Most of these roads are in rural areas, which face challenges of peripherality and lack of accessibility to increasingly-centralised provision of services.