Abstract
Europe’s national safety strategies indicates that safer road design and layout would do the most in the direction of reducing the rate of severe injury and death occurring in road accidents, especially in countries where messages concerning safer vehicles and better driver behaviour are generally accepted and understood, such as my country of origin.
According to the EU Commission, road infrastructure and road design are a contributing factor in one out of three fatal accidents. Well-documented experience in Europe and elsewhere shows that a demonstrably effective and cost-beneficial tool to improve road safety is formal and systematic safety audit procedures. Procedures that should enable skills of accident analysis and road safety engineering, to be used for the prevention of accidents on new or modified - treated existing roads. In addition, procedures that can help assess the accident potential and safety performance of roads can and should be integrated in all phases of road planning, design, operation, intervention and inspection.
This paper deals with road accidents Europe-wide in general and concentrates in Cyprus as a case study of what is the current situation concerning road accidents and what are the proposed measures to attend the issue or road deaths. Moreover it describes the proposed strategies and practices on European level and especially in Cyprus, but also what should be done in addition, in order to achieve the goal of reducing car accident fatalities. Furthermore it identifies the causes and effects of road deaths concerning road infrastructure, management and practices and finally tries to propose low cost and sustainable solutions in the direction of preventing and minimizing the loss of human lives from road accidents. Some of the various solutions proposed on the Cyprus case study and also new safety knowledge at international and European level are thoroughly examined and discussed. It concentrates on proposed measures that are currently applied and validated in cooperation with the Cypriot administrative authorities after the author’s intervention on previous road safety projects.
To add some, this paper also tries to convince road engineers to focus on treating high risk infrastructure sites, as this is an area of road safety work where substantial and sustainable casualty reductions can be achieved, in relatively short time and also at low cost. This paper is a significant effort to improve the building of awareness, knowledge and political leadership, in order to ensure that effective road infrastructure safety management will become common practice at all stages of decision-making, from road planning and design to operation and intervention.
Keywords: Road accidents, road deaths, infrastructure management, improve road safety, low cost measures, sustainable solutions.