Road safety management in Lisbon: Development of efficient corrective safety measures

Abstract

A research project, “IRUMS – Safer urban roads”, aims to develop a procedure for the explicit consideration of safety issues in the decision making process of urban transportation networks and in the allocation of resources for street renewal. More specifically, criteria for selecting dangerous urban sites (areas or sections) are being defined and a procedure for selecting efficient infrastructure corrective safety measures is being developed. Co-financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology, this project is carried out by the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering and the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Coimbra, with the cooperation of the Lisbon Municipality and the Portuguese Police. Five years road accident records, data on road infrastructure characteristics and traffic and land use information were collected and integrated in a Geographic Information System, where all information may be graphically visualized and analysed. The database and the process of feeding it are broadly described in this paper. This paper also presents a State of the Art for Urban Road Safety Measures that will be associated to evaluate different possibilities of implementation in the Lisbon Network.