Road Safety overview
Summary of indicator
| Indicator Name | Road safety |
| Indicator Type | Core |
| User Outcome | Low risk |
Objective
To measure and identify road safety risks and trends in crashes over time on NSW roads.
Application guidance
A healthy environment is one where the road is safe – reducing the risk of injury by design, where the speed and street environment both minimise the risk of serious injury. Factors like road speed and geometry affect the safety of the community.
This indicator will support practitioners to understand problems on the network. Based on the outcome of the assessment, practitioners can determine whether intervention and further road safety treatments across the safe system pillars – safer people, vehicles, roads and speed – may be required.
Practitioners can use the AusRAP vehicular risk rating metric to measure the vehicular road safety risk star rating on State roads.
Practitioners can use the crashes per 100 million vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) metric to measure the rate of fatal and serious injury (FSI) crashes occurring relevant to the vehicle kilometres travelled.
Practitioners can use the FSI and casualty crash rates metric to measure the rate of FSI crashes occurring per kilometre per year on the road network.
Metrics
- AusRAP vehicular risk rating
- Crashes per 100 million vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT)
- FSI and casualty crash rates
Related indicators
 | Comfort and Safety |
Recommendation
- To ensure a detailed and accurate analysis, manual data collection (i.e. traffic and speed surveys) should be undertaken
- For high place intensity, surveys should be carried out to determine operating speeds and calculate the safe speed. Other risks should be assessed by a road safety practitioner to indicate any other road safety risks present
- For rural and urban roads with low place intensity, risks should be assessed by a road safety practitioner to indicate any other road safety risks
- Analysis of road safety is relevant to the desired road safety outcome of zero trauma on all roads in NSW by 2050 (Future Transport Strategy 2056, pp. 43). Output values will need to trend towards zero for all roads in NSW over the next 30 years to achieve this outcome
- To complement the analysis of road safety, safe system assessments could be undertaken.
Metrics in detail
Guidance on applicability of metrics
The flow chart below is a basic guide on how to use the various road safety metrics by identifying the study area as urban or rural, and determining the place intensity.