82 Unfall und Verkehrsinfrastruktur
Im September 2005 wurde erstmals eine FERSI Scientific Road Safety Research Conference durchgeführt. Mit der Konferenz sollten Resultate und Bearbeitungsstände der gemeinsamen europäischen Forschungsprojekte der FERSI Mitglieder präsentiert werden. Darüber hinaus sollten die Ergebnisse wichtiger nationaler Forschungsprojekte eingebunden sowie den Projektbearbeitern Gelegenheit zum internationalen "Networking" gegeben werden. Wolfgang Hahn, Leiter der Abteilung Straßenbau und Straßenverkehr beim Bundesministerium für Verkehr-, Bau- und Wohnungswesen unterstrich in seiner Eröffnungsrede die Notwendigkeit einer in Europa koordinierten Verkehrssicherheitsforschung, um gemeinsam zu einer Verbesserung der Straßenverkehrssicherheit zu gelangen. Aus Sicht des Leiters des Referates "Sicherheit im Straßenverkehr" der DG TREN, Dimitrios Theologitis, besteht die zentrale Aufgabe der zukünftigen europäischen Verkehrssicherheitsforschung in der Entwicklung und Verbreitung von "Best Practices". Auch er betonte, dass die Verkehrssicherheitsprobleme in Europa auch in Zukunft nur durch eine enge Zusammenarbeit der EU-Mitgliedsländer im Bereich der Forschung und durch die Umsetzung der dabei erzielten Forschungsergebnisse zu lösen seien.rnIm Anschluss an die Eröffnungsreden stellten Rune Elvik, TOI (Norwegen), Marc Gaudry, INRETS (Frankreich), David Lynam, TRL (United Kingdom) und Dr. Rudolf Krupp, BASt (Germany), in ihren Vorträgen herausragende Forschungsergebnisse im Bereich der Straßenverkehrssicherheit vor. Die sich an diese erste Vortragsrunde anschließenden Workshops waren entsprechend der Themenschwerpunkte "Daten, Strategien und Kommunikation", "Verhalten und Aufklärung" sowie "Technische Anwendungsmöglichkeiten" unterteilt. Jeder Themenschwerpunkt wurde durch 4 nacheinanderfolgende Workshops abgedeckt. In einer abschließenden Sitzung wurden die wichtigsten Ergebnisse der einzelnen Workshops vom jeweiligen Chairman des Workshops dem gesamten Plenum vorgestellt. rn
The National Roads Authority in Ireland is responsible for planning and supervision of construction and maintenance works on the National Road network. Its primary function is "to secure the provision of a safe and efficient network of national roads". The population of Ireland has grown rapidly from 3.5 million to 4 million within the past 10 years, and vehicle ownership has also risen rapidly to 2 million vehicles, with 2.2 million drivers. Collisions rates in Ireland are at approximately 1.5 collisions per 1,000 population (in 2002), and 8.4 deaths per 1,000,000 population (in 2003). This ranked 8th out of the 15 countries in the European Union at the time. Ireland- current Road Safety Strategy includes Engineering Targets. These are to complete construction of certain lengths of new motorway, dual carriageway and 2+1 highway, to implement a certain number of accident remedial and traffic calming schemes, and to implement road safety audit on all new schemes. The accident remedial schemes, traffic calming schemes, and road safety audit are all the responsibility of the Road Safety section of NRA. The road safety programme of the NRA is divided into four main areas; a) accident remedial measures at individual sites, b) accident remedial treatment of entire routes, c) traffic calming of towns and villages on main roads, d) road safety audit. Examples of these measures are described. Evaluation of past programmes of single site accident remedial measures show a reduction in collision occurrence at these sites, but the effectiveness and the economic rate of return is decreasing over successive programmes. A similar programme has now been adopted on the rest of the country- road network, on regional and local roads. The programme of remedial treatment of entire routes has only recently started and has not been evaluated. Evaluation of the first programme of traffic calming of towns and villages shows an overall decrease in collisions and their severity, and a small reduction in speed. Road Safety Audit, examining new schemes a number of times during design and after construction, has been standard procedure on the national road network for nearly 6 years. An evaluation is currently underway.
The European Union has set a target to reduce all road fatalities (over 40,000) with 50% in 2010. This target percentage remained unchanged with the introduction of the ten new member states within the EU as by May 1st, 2004. According to Eurostat, 34% of all fatalities in 1998 in the, then, fifteen states of the European Union were the result of single vehicle collisions. This represents over 14,000 lives lost each year of which many can likely be saved through better roadside infrastructure design. The challenge for road safety professionals is to find methods and design strategies that help to reduce these casualties. Procedures for full-scale vehicle crash testing of guard rails were first published in the US in 1962. Present European regulation is mainly based on these procedures and later developments. Since then the vehicle fleet has changed considerably. Due to the complexity of the actual safety problem the numerical simulation approach offers a good opportunity to evaluate the different parameters involved in road safety, such as infrastructure properties, vehicle type, vehicle occupants and injuries. The ideal situation would be that simulation tools are coupled or integrated and all involved effects would be related. At the moment this is not the case yet, but initiatives are taken and a new virtual era has started. This paper offers a method looking at two components that encompass the driving environment: the car and the guardrail. As part of the EC-funded project, RISER (Roadside Infrastructure for Safer European Roads) a multi body simulation program study is carried out to determine sensitivities of some parameters in car to guardrail collisions and gives insides in performance of the car with passive safety equipment, the guardrail and the interaction of these objects with each other. By offering a set of methods that includes these two aspects and their intertwining relations, more confidence can be gained in actually reducing fatalities due to single vehicle collisions with, or due to, roadside furniture. Reducing the number of fatalities of single vehicle crashes would contribute greatly to the stated goal of reducing casualties altogether.