RADAR project Partner KFV (Austrian Road Safety Board) launched a 3-day Road Infrastructure Safety Training course on September 16-18, 2019, in Vienna, Austria.

As explained by the project partner representative, Klaus Machata, “we had a good training – three very interesting days. We learned a lot. I was not aware of how complex and comprehensive the whole machinery and road assessment programme of EuroRAP is. Many road safety experts contributed to discussion – even though it was in English. I am glad to have had that training in Austria.”

In his introductory speech to the RADAR project and the Road Assessment Programme (RAP) Methodology, Marko Ševrović, EuroRAP-EIRA, spoke about the methodology used in RADAR which is developed by world-leading road safety research agencies. He explained how important it is to have a simple, objective and comparable measure of the safety of road infrastructure in urban and rural areas. The methodology used in RADAR focuses on star rating and risk mapping.

Star Rating is modelling the future, risk mapping is criticizing the past

As explained by Bojan Jovanović, FPZ, “risk mapping is used to determine the risk of road traffic accident occurrence on road sections based on historical road traffic accident and AADT (annual average daily traffic) data, whereas star rating is proactive methodology which is based on coding relevant road and road environment characteristics in order to determine the risk of total and serious injuries in case when road traffic accident has already occurred.” Or, in other words – star rating is modelling the future, whereas risk mapping is criticizing the past, Ševrović added.  

The 3-day training course in Austria was divided into three different sessions. The first one was focused on risk mapping and their application in tracking performance, the second on the star rating process and the use of ViDA web tools. During the third session, the process of making investment plans in safer ways and collecting data about them for coding as well as the encoding process itself were presented.

Ševrović commented, that the training course in Austria was “probably the best one we have had so far – that is in terms of the quality of the presentations. The big part of that is we probably had more experience by then. Of course, the whole concept is a quite a complicated thing and maybe 3-days is quite a short period for actually people getting the full confidence in using the system. But this gives us a lot of inputs on how we should structure the webinar. A lot of things that were not covered in this training, can be presented in the webinars”.  

The webinars following the training courses will be held soon. Stay tuned for more information.

Road Safety Training courses will be also delivered in Serbia, Czech Republic, Hungary and Moldova. Follow our official RADAR calendar to not miss a thing.