Safer Roads Fund, UK
The UK’s Safer Roads Fund is providing £175 million (EUR 200 million) in capital investment to improve safety on the 50 highest-risk primary road (or ‘A’ road) sections in England. The selection is based on the frequency of collisions causing death or serious injury relative to traffic volumes. In January 2017, the local authorities responsible for the identified sections were invited to apply for funding for upgrades. The Road Safety Foundation helped evaluate their applications and trained local authorities to assess and map the risks on the routes in question and identify measures to counter them.

The authorities then drew up Safer Road Investment Plans detailing cost-effective ways of improving the roads so as to prevent serious and fatal injuries. These include completion of continuous safety barriers and rumble strips, removal of or protection against dangerous roadside objects, improvements to footpaths, pedestrian crossings and signage, extension of sealed shoulders, installation of energy-absorbing barrier ends, and renewal of lane markings. The plans were submitted as part of the applications and the work will be carried out between 2017-2018 and 2020-2021.

Upgrades to Slovakia's motorways
In 2013, Slovakia’s National Motorway Company joined the South East Neighbourhood Safe Routes (SENSoR) project to assess the safety of its road network and secure iRAP ratings for its roads. Over half of the roads received two stars or less in the 5-star rating.

During 2014 and 2015, improvements were implemented on 327 km of road identified by SENSoR, including the D1 and D2 motorways and the R1 expressway. Many of the measures were taken from an iRAP Safer Road Investment Plan, including installing safety barriers, energy-absorbing barrier ends, rumble strips and cat’s eyes, building embankments, extending sealed shoulders, and removing dangerous roadside objects.

Costing some EUR 40 million, the work has brought infrastructure safety levels on almost a third of Slovakia’s motorways and expressways into line with those of the most advanced European countries. This should prevent an estimated 355 deaths and serious injuries over 20 years. The RADAR project will follow up by furthering implementation of risk mapping and the Safer Road Investment Plan approach in the Danube region.

Poland and the Baltic States
This flagship project aims to assess the safety of the infrastructure on around 1 550 km of road within the TEN-T North Sea-Baltic Corridor in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland where – with the exception of Estonia – road fatality rates are well above the EU average.

To ensure a coherent assessment, the projects intend to apply internationally accepted methodologies throughout, such as those used by EuroRAP. Based on selected road inspection data, sections of road will receive star ratings as a simple and objective measure of their inherent levels of safety for vehicle occupants, motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians. Furthermore, mapping of risk levels as regards accidents, injuries and death will pinpoint routes requiring upgrades. These elements should feed into the compilation of Safer Road Investment Plans detailing where safety can be improved in a cost-effective way. The project should also lead to the development of a common safety assessment approach for deployment under future projects.