Safety Oriented Road Asset Management Methodology for Urban Areas

Modern cities require new engineered approaches to tackle the challenges related to smart, sustainable and safe urban mobility. In this connection, preserving the functional condition of road infrastructures is of paramount importance. Following the recent European Directive on Road Safety Management, in this paper a new safety-oriented methodology for road asset management system in urban areas has been developed and presented. The proposed methodology is based on the results obtained from the accident analysis and the current road assets conditions gained by means of road safety inspections. All the collected data are combined into an urban road management system model that is able to convert qualitative judgements into quantitative values in order to evaluate budget allocation and prioritization of road maintenance interventions basing on a global performance safety function. In order to validate the proposed method, a 30 km long Italian urban road network has been examined and safety inspections have been carried out to gain information on asset conditions together with related traffic and accident data. Finally, according to a hypothesized triennial investment plan, the best three-years maintenance program has been identified accomplishing the principle of maximum reduction of accident rate. Results obtained so far highlight that the proposed method may be a useful tool for municipal road agencies.