iRAP India 4 States Project

ARRB is presently leading the data collection in the iRAP India 4 states project funded by the World Bank Global Road Safety Facility as part of the Bloomberg Road Safety in 10 countries initiative. Road safety is a significant problem in India with more than 300 deaths each day.

The iRAP project involves collecting video and pavement condition data across 3,000 kilometres of selected road corridors in the Indian states of Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat and generating road safety ratings for each of the routes. Each state is either preparing to undertake or is undertaking World Bank financed projects on their road networks and the intention is to implement the key outcomes from the iRAP assessment to ensure these roads are built to be as safe as possible for vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians.

The project was officially launched in New Delhi last November and in January 2011 more than 25 road engineers from the four states gathered for a five day iRAP training course arranged by ARRB at the Automobile Association of Upper India facilities in New Delhi. The core training was undertaken by Ms. Van Hoang from ARRB and Mr. Luke Rogers from iRAP and focussed on teaching the participants how to rate more than 30 different road design attributes that are known to influence the likelihood of a crash and its severity from the video data using ARRB’s Hawkeye Processing Toolkit.

The survey data collection phase was completed this month and was collected by the Indian Road Survey and Management (IRSM) company using an ARRB Hawkeye 2000 Network Survey Vehicle.

The survey data is now being assessed by a local coding team, consisting of those who attended the training in New Delhi, under the supervision of an ARRB expert. The coding will be conducted separately in each state.

For an video update (via YouTube) on the project, click here.