INNOVATIVE TOOLS AND PRACTICAL METHODS TO IMPROVE THE SAFETY OF THE NATIONAL ROAD NETWORK IN FRANCE

摘要

The operators of the French national road network improve user safety by designing, operating and maintaining more than 20,000 km of roads. The transposition of European Directive No. 2008/96/EC on road infrastructure safety management is an opportunity to reinforce, complete and promote the four procedures used in France to improve the users’ safety. The article discusses how these approaches are applied in practice, feeds back lessons from their implementation and presents their recent developments in connection with the Directive. Then, an innovative tool for real time collecting of the infrastructure components is presented: ISRI'Cam. The Road Safety Impact Assessment procedure allows to detect and quantify the safety impacts of the different variants of the project studied, to feed the debate leading to the choice of a variant. For new roads or those substantially modified, the Road Project Safety Monitoring procedure (in French CSPR) organizes safety audits performed at different study stages of the project, prior to traffic opening, and then after a few months of road operation. On the existing network, the User Safety on the Existing Network procedure (in French SURE) allows to rank the sections of routes depending on their potential gain of safety. On sections with the greatest ranking/potential, a complete diagnosis of the infrastructure (accident analysis, collection of road characteristics data) is made, resulting in an action plan with ex-post assessment. Since 2009, road safety inspections (in French ISRI) are performed every three years. Specially trained inspectors, not knowing the route and independent of the local road operator, cover the network during day and night. With their "fresh eyes" focus, they detect events of infrastructure connected with safety that daily road operators would no longer perceive. These procedures, defined in the technical documentation of the Ministry, ensure, on the national road network, a homogeneity in the treatment of the road, a rationalization of the means and therefore an increase in the efficiency of road operators. Deployed since 2010, ISRI'Cam allows, easily and at low cost, to locate events of the infrastructure, take a photo, record an audio comment and create an inspection report. Many other applications (knowledge of network, mapping of road equipments) are possible with this innovative tool.