October 14, 2020: Projects Risk Assessment on Danube Area Roads (RADAR) and Saving Lives Assessing and Improving TEN-T Road Network Safety (SLAIN) hosted the Questions and Answers session focusing on the future of road safety using a network-wide risk assessment. The event was part of this year’s European Week of Regions and Cities, which is an annual Brussels-based event dedicated to regional policy and development by the European Committee of the Regions.

The Q&A session was opened by Olivera Rozi, Project Director, European Institute of Road Assessment - EuroRAP (EIRA), and Lead Partner of project RADAR. The session highlighted the innovative approach that identifies high-risk roads, consider infrastructure safety improvements, and propose the best cost-benefit solutions available using a methodology of network-wide risk assessment. According to George Yannis, National Technical University of Athens: “Investing in road safety improvement in these priority areas will maximise lives and injuries saved by the prevention of crashes. The network-wide road safety assessment serves also informs both the users and the authorities for the most or least safe roads eventually through a star rating system and support the decision making for driver and the users. This is a new trend, but it is the new necessary trend.”

Road safety is a fundamental human right. While the number of road deaths continues to grow every day, it is often forgotten that the quality of road infrastructure plays an extremely important role in preventing road accidents.

To work towards the implementation of both the United Nations and European Commission goals on road safety and especially supporting authorities on the network-wide road safety assessment requirements of the new Directive 2019/136, a systematic approach to safer road infrastructure is needed. The network-wide risk assessment tackled in RADAR and SLAIN projects is an international methodology that is compatible and accepted by the updated European Directive and other International Organisations (WHO, World Bank).

The questions within the Q&A session concerned the relationship among different safety assessment methodologies in use and transparency of EuroRAP methodology that is being used Europe-wide. As Lina Konstantinopoulou, Secretary-General, European Institute of Road Assessment - EuroRAP (EIRA) commented: “We want to save lives on the infrastructure. EuroRAP as such does not perform any technical assessment, it is our members who globally assess roads. We provide free tools, training, and systems to governments, mobility clubs, to make our roads safer. Above all, iRAP metrics is a global metrics, it has been recognised by the UN Sustainability Goals – especially target three, which focuses on achieving technical standards for road safety or meet a minimum of three-star rating or better.”  

One of the overarching conclusions among the keynote speakers was there is a real reason to believe that a key to respond to all those challenges is transnational cooperation – between countries, between different stakeholders including universities, engineers, NGOs, and the public through NGOs. As Olivera Rozi concluded the session: “Whichever method we choose in the future to improve road safety, the most important thing and the result of that should be lives saved n roads. Not until lives are saved on roads, we will not achieve any goal.”

All questions raised within the Q&A session and questions that were submitted to us beforehand, are recorded and can be visited HERE.

Speakers at the Q&A session with projects RADAR and SLAIN:

• Stelios Efstathiadis, General Manager, Transportation Solutions
• Lina Konstantinopoulou, Secretary-General, European Institute of Road Assessment - EuroRAP (EIRA)
• Sanja Leš, Project manager, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences
• Olivera Rozi, Project Director, European Institute of Road Assessment - EuroRAP (EIRA)
• Danai Stavrou, Sociologist - Adults Instructor (Department of Quality Management), Road Safety Institute (R.S.I) Panos Mylonas
• George Yannis, Professor, National Technical University of Athens
• Marko Ševrović, Senior Road Safety Engineer, European Institute of Road Assessment - EuroRAP (EIRA)

More about project RADAR here

More about project SLAIN here