ITT has been working with Sweroad on the development of ERA’s National Road Safety Strategy and Action Plan (2024-2028), for which ITT provided the project’s Team Leader to Sweroad.  The project has recently been completed, with high praise received from ERA for the quality of the work produced and the innovative approach to producing the required outputs.  The Strategy is based on six thematic areas:

• Thematic Area 1 – Safer Roads by Design
• Thematic Area 2 – Speed Management
• Thematic Area 3 – Identification of High-Risk Locations
• Thematic Area 4 – Retrospective Road Safety Infrastructure Improvements
• Thematic Area 5 – Training and Capacity Building
• Thematic Area 6 – Research

Once implemented, the consultancy estimates that the number of fatalities on the ERA road network will be reduced by 8,700 lives a year, a reduction of 32% from the current casualty rate nationally.  This is based purely on infrastructure improvements applied to the 18,000km of ERA’s paved road network and does not include improvements of roads in cities under local city government administrations, or the much wider unpaved road network.

The strategy and action plan have been developed in accordance with the wider overarching National Road Safety Strategy developed by the Ministry of Transport, which is aligned with the Safe Systems approach to improving road safety.  As such, the underlying theme of the strategy is around speed reduction measures in order to reduce the frequency of crashes, and to bring crash severities down to survivable levels.

Amongst the most innovative elements of the project was a network-wide iRAP Star Rating Assessment undertaken using a hybrid methodology, in which existing road condition and inventory data were re-coded and input into iRAP’s ViDA Star Rating Assessment tool, thereby producing both Star Ratings and a Strategic Investment Plan for the entire 18,000km paved road network.

The project Team Leader, Andy McLoughlin, commented, “ITT is about, and has always been about, developing intermediate technology solutions that fit the circumstances in each individual country and project”.  Waiting for countries to “catch up” in order to supply everything needed to feed a tool (or deploy a methodology) created for highly developed country environments delays development or, in worse situations, provides an excuse for doing nothing to address serious issues, like improving road safety.  To make progress, we need to shift the mindset away from what we don’t have, towards what we do have, or could realistically get, and then be innovative about how it can be used to meet the required objectives”.