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 EuropeanDirective No. 2008/96/EC on road infrastructure safety management is an opportunity toreinforce, 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 lessonsfrom their implementation and presents their recent developments in connection with theDirective. Then, an innovative tool for real time collecting of the infrastructure componentsis presented: ISRI'Cam.The Road Safety Impact Assessment procedure allows to detect and quantify the safetyimpacts of the different variants of the project studied, to feed the debate leading to thechoice of a variant.For new roads or those substantially modified, the Road Project Safety Monitoringprocedure (in French CSPR) organizes safety audits performed at different study stages ofthe 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 FrenchSURE) allows to rank the sections of routes depending on their potential gain of safety. Onsections with the greatest ranking/potential, a complete diagnosis of the infrastructure(accident analysis, collection of road characteristics data) is made, resulting in an actionplan 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 roadoperator, cover the network during day and night. With their "fresh eyes" focus, they detectevents of infrastructure connected with safety that daily road operators would no longerperceive.These procedures, defined in the technical documentation of the Ministry, ensure, on thenational road network, a homogeneity in the treatment of the road, a rationalization of themeans 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 theinfrastructure, take a photo, record an audio comment and create an inspection report.Many other applications (knowledge of network, mapping of road equipments) are possiblewith this innovative tool.