ARRB has experience and capability the in development of software and manual applications to assist road safety practitioners to:
- identify and assess road hazards and to evaluate treatments
- streamline engineering evaluations and decision making
- set appropriate speed limits.
There are numerous examples of existing applications developed for clients in Australia, New Zealand and many other countries. Some are professional-level PC applications for use by a larger number of licensed practitioners. Others are low-cost yet highly specialised decision support tools for experts and program managers.
ARRB has developed a suite of software tools to assist road safety professionals to; identify hazards and deficiencies in the road environment proactively assess hazards and treatments, set appropriate speed limits.
These include:
- Speed limits (X-Limits suite)
- Road Safety Audit Toolkit
- Road Safety Risk Manager
- Austroads Road Safety Engineering Toolkit
- NetRisk - Road network safety assessment
Speed Limits (X-Limits suite)
The consistent and appropriate setting of speed limits is critical to ensure the covered limits are set, and provide the travelling public with speed limits and speed environments that are expected and understood.
ARRB has worked with Austroads and different road authorities to develop a suite of speed limit setting software tailored to an individual jurisdiction’s needs. These web-based programs guide road authority engineers to select appropriate speed limits for the road environment, road user and traffic flow conditions in a consistent and defensible way.
ARRB’s speed limit setting software has been tailored for all Australian states, including Victoria (VLimits 2.0), South Australia (SALIMITS), Queensland (QLIMITS/SLR-QLD), New South Wales (NLIMITS), Western Australia (WALIMITS 3.0) and Tasmania (TLIMITS). Overseas applications have been developed for New Zealand (NZLIMITS) and the United States (USLIMITS). New generations of the software are being developed to apply speed limits that achieve the aims of the Safe System vision
Back to top
Road Safety Audit Toolkit
The Road Safety Audit (RSA) Toolkit is an online tool that assists practitioners to carry out road safety audits, helping them to:
- undertake road safety audits at any stage of a project – feasibility, preliminary design, detail design and pre-opening, roadwork traffic scheme and existing roads
- generate a road safety audit report with recommendations
- link to Australasian and jurisdiction-specific references and standards
- manage and keep track of members in a road safety audit team.
Contact: rsatoolkit@arrb.com.au
Back to top
Road Safety Risk Manager
The Road Safety Risk Manager (RSRM) has been developed to provide road safety professionals with a user friendly tool to proactively assess road safety hazards and treatments for the purpose of prioritising actions. The tool adopts a risk management approach, with the ultimate aim of maximising the risk reduction on the road network for a given budget.
The RSRM can assist you to:
- assess the road safety value of over 60 different engineering treatments for different sites
- prioritise a series of potential projects to maximise the road safety value of a program of works
- document and track assessments of each issue
- achieve the maximum road safety benefit from the investment in road engineering treatments.
The RSRM can be used for assessing and ranking:
- road safety audit recommendations
- mass action programs of work (eg. guard-rail, line marking,sign replacement)
- safety-related routine maintenance issues
- responses to road safety issues raised by the community or through regular inspection programs
- design audit recommendations.
Following the collection of site information, the tool allows the assessment in 5-10 minutes. RSRM includes reporting and budget analysis tools to assist with risk identification, risk management and the development of remedial treatment programs.
Contact: rsrm@arrb.com.au
Back to top
Austroads Road Safety Engineering Toolkit
ARRB, in association with Austroads, has developed a Road Safety Engineering Toolkit for road safety practioners and engineers. It outlines best-practice, low cost, high return road environment measures to achieve a reduction in road trauma.
The Toolkit seeks to reduce the severity and frequency of crashes involving road environment factors. Provision of safer roads and roadsides is a major area of gain under the National Road Safety Strategy and is a strategic priority area for Austroads research.
The Toolkit draws together existing road safety engineering knowledge for easy access. The knowledge has been updated with recent experience from local and state government agencies, and with the results of comprehensive road safety research reviews.
Visit www.engtoolkit.com.au
Back to top
NetRisk - Road Network Safety Assessment
Road authorities are obliged under law to maintain minimum levels of information regarding the safety condition and quality of their road network. Recognising the need for a standardised yet flexible approach, ARRB Group in collaboration with the Queensland Roads Alliance has developed a network assessment process that can be applied across any road environment.
Utilising the latest Austroads research findings, NetRisk is designed to enable road authorities to rapidly assess the safety condition of any road network. Only the most hazardous locations are highlighted for detailed investigation according to the road authority’s resource levels and local considerations.
Network inspections can be time consuming and resource intensive. Often as a result of the inspection, practitioners identify more sites than they can afford to treat with available resources.
NetRisk changes the traditional approach by using a research proven method to prompt practitioners to investigate only the most hazardous sites.
Sites are highlighted only when they exceed minimum preset safety requirements, allowing the practitioner to configure the system to detect a manageable number of hazardous locations in each budgeting period.
Application of the NetRisk method involves a two-stage process:
- Stage 1 involves a network level assessment, to focus attention on high-risk sections of the network.
- Stage 2 involves the detailed investigation at the project level of the high-risk sites, to locate and analyse specific hazards and preferred treatment options.
All standard road types can be compared and assessed:
- urban mid-block
- urban intersection (major/minor)
- sealed rural mid-block
- unsealed rural mid-block
- rural intersection (major/minor).
NetRisk can:
- quickly and efficiently inspect an entire road network and detect the highest risk sites
- match local resource demand with availability
- assess low volume unsealed and sealed rural roads, in a comparable way with urban and town environments
- meet legal obligations and responsibilities, including duty of care
- focus upon engineering features, not on routine maintenance issues
- progressively improve the linkages between safety needs and funding
- apply consistency in the approach to road safety across the entire network.
NetRisk uses the latest research models, so road authorities can be sure they are providing their practitioners with the latest, most comprehensive road network assessment tool available in the market.
NetRisk implementation
ARRB’s NetRisk assessment services provide;
- comprehensive reporting including a network-wide ‘risk snapshot’
- concise ranking of the highest-risk sites across a network
- detailed listing of the nature of high-risk attributes
- Geographic information system (GIS) mapping functions
- ‘risk worm’ analysis of selected routes.
Treatments at the identified high-risk locations can be evaluated using the Road Safety Risk Manager.
Back to top