RTMC/SARF road safety audit workshop road safety tools & current status of road safety audits at SANRAL

Abstract

SANRAL fully supports the Decade of Action (DoA) for Road Safety call by the Commission of Global Road Safety, and endorsed by the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration. This global drive to curb the carnage on the roads was officially launched in May 2011, and has the primary goal of reducing road deaths by half by 2020. Based on the recommendations of the World Health Organisation’s World report on road traffic injury prevention, countries are encouraged to focus on the following five road safety pillars, namely: Road Safety Management, Safer Roads and Mobility, Safer Vehicles, Safer Road Users and Post-Crash Response. SANRAL’s direct sphere of influence relates specifically to the Pillars of Safer Roads and Mobility, Safer Road Users, and Post-Crash Response. For Safer Roads and Mobility we refer to road infrastructure interventions directly on the road network, for Safer Road Users we refer to our Road Safety Education and Awareness Programmes, and for Post-Crash Responses we refer to the rollout and operations of Road Incident Management Systems on the entire national road network, including the use of technology on the Freeway Management Systems deployed on the busiest freeways on the Western Cape, Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng Provinces. These are the main focus areas where we will continue to promote and improve road safety for all our road users. As a proactive measure SANRAL has developed a Road Safety Audit (RSA) Policy and Programme for implementation. The RSA is a proactive means of ensuring that we can provide road infrastructure, that is more forgiving, self-explaining, meets the needs of all road users. The RSA promotes a culture of road safety among Designers, through promoting the Safe System philosophy, with a special emphasis on high risk issues (fatal and serious injury crashes).