Achieving Vision Zero: The Role of Network Safety Planning in Road Safety

Like many countries, Australia has set national targets for zero road deaths and serious injuries by 2050. To achieve this, significant reductions in road related trauma must be made over the next 25 years. With road trauma trends plateauing and even increasing in some jurisdictions, what many governments lack is a clear and actionable plan to achieve this vision.

A concept many government authorities are progressing with is “vision zero planning” or “network safety planning”. These plans identify the scale of road safety improvements (primarily infrastructure and speed limit changes) and level of investment that are required to achieve zero deaths and serious injuries, considering fleet trends in vehicle crashworthiness and safety technology adoption and their impact on road trauma.

Often these plans identify the required improvements down to individual corridor segment or intersection level and leverage road classification frameworks like Movement and Place to balance the types of treatments applied to different types of roads to address the risk facing different road users. Overlaying this with significant policy change at a network level, jurisdictions can quickly identify how close they will get to zero and where road trauma is not being addressed.

The benefits to states, territories and local councils of developing Network Safety Plans include:

• Clearly communicate the systemic crash types contributing to road trauma across their network – enabling governments and councils to proactively target treatments by risk across different types of roads, as opposed to addressing risks after crashes occur.
• Develop evidence-based intervention packages and standard cross-sections for different road types and intersections that eliminate fatal and serious injuries based on human tolerances to crash-forces. This in turn drives a consistent network approach to treating road safety issues and maximises the potential benefits of interventions.
• Visualise the ‘gap’ on their network, between the current state and the desired ‘vision zero’ end-state, using linked network and asset data. This helps road managers to identify safety deficiencies before crashes occur and drive investment in corridors that may not have a crash-history that justifies investment under traditional blackspot approaches.
• Develop a pipeline of Safe System-aligned projects and programs, optimising the allocation of resources to the roads and streets that need road safety investment. Having a developed pipeline allows governments and councils to rapidly develop projects when funding becomes available.
• Model the effectiveness of closing this gap and identifying Safe System-based policy opportunities to address residual road trauma risks, for example pedestrians on high-speed rural roads. This allows road managers to test different scenarios for treating their networks and understanding the long-term and cumulative impact of different approaches.
• Communicate the required investment levels to senior stakeholders and decision makers to achieve agreed trauma reduction targets, generating support for further investment and intervention approaches that require shifts in current policies.
• Track progress towards road safety trauma reduction targets, including the ability to develop and measure data-driven network Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs). This in turn enables governments and local councils to demonstrate progress in improving network safety where traditional outcome-based approaches are not viable.

These benefits are not just for large roading authorities. A major benefit for the smaller local councils, is being able to use Network Safety Plans to more successfully advocate for funding through state and national road safety programs and grants. Councils can also use Network Safety Plans to align safety improvements with asset programs – like identifying corridors where the road should be widened and sealed as part of a seal renewal program or out-of-context curves that require delineation a part of signage and line-marking programs.

One of the key challenges in developing a Network Safety Plan is knowing where to start. Guidance on some aspects of Network Safety Plans is provided in existing guidance, particularly through Austroads Guides, while some states are currently developing their own state-level guidance for developing Network Safety Plans. Meanwhile best practice in developing Network Safety Plans is emerging as early-adopters develop their plans and others learn from their experiences.

Another challenge is understanding the data, including aggregating or linking road trauma, road network and asset datasets. Many of these datasets are not readily available for many local councils. Depending on the size of the road network, there are fit-for purpose approaches to streamlining this data-build and for many local councils, state and national authorities have made significant progress in network wide risk-rating approaches like Infrastructure Risk Rating (IRR) or AusRAP star-ratings that can be leveraged for these plans. The recently released “Local Government Network Risk Assessment Frameworks” from Australia’s Office of Road Safety is a helpful guide that explores these approaches further.

Once developed, jurisdictions can better track their progress towards 2050 targets, be more informed about where they are, or are not, delivering across their network and ultimately make the direct and informed investment on their network needed to eliminate road trauma across their road networks.

Contact us today to put your safety vision into action

Abley have extensive experience in developing Network Safety Plans and Vision Zero Plans in New Zealand and Australia, including developing guidance for local government. Get in touch with Matt Allan (matt.allan@abley.com), Paul Durdin (paul.durdin@abley.com) or Dale Harris (dale.harris@abley.com) if you want to understand more about these plans and how we can help you implement Safe System and vision zero across your network.