Citation

Cafiso S, D'Agostino C, Persaud BN. Traffic Injury Prev. 2017; 18(3): 324-329.

Affiliation

Ryerson University Department of Civil Engineering 350 Victoria Street , Toronto , Canada M5B2K3 Phone Fax.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/15389588.2016.1203424

PMID

27327173

Abstract

A new European Union (EU) regulation for safety barriers, which is based on performance, has encouraged road agencies to perform an upgrade of old barriers, with the expectation that there will be safety benefits at the retrofitted sites. The new class of barriers was designed and installed in compliance with the 1998 (European Norm) EN 1317 standards for road restraint systems, which lays down common requirements for the testing and certification of road restraint systems in all countries of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). Both the older and new barriers are made of steel and are installed in such a way as to avoid vehicle intrusion, but the older ones are thought to be only effective at low speeds and large angles of impact. The new standard seeks to remedy this by providing better protection at higher speeds. The paper seeks to quantify the effect on the frequency of fatal+injury crashes of retrofitting motorways with barriers meeting the new standards, by performing an empirical Bayes before-after analysis based on data from the A18 Messina-Catania motorway in Italy. The results confirm that there is a safety benefit for ran off road crashes and no benefit for other crashes. The magnitude of this benefit indicates that the retrofits are cost-effective even for total crashes and should continue in any European country.

Language: en