Assessments // Star rating designs
Apart from assessing existing roads, Star Ratings are being used to ensure that safety is built-in to designs for major upgrades and new roads prior to construction.
It is critically important that people’s safety and well-being is not overlooked in favour of more traditional objectives such as reducing congestion and travel times. The seven major multilateral development banks are improving safety performance measures for the road designs they finance. Similarly, the Commission for Global Road Safety recommends that desired design speeds for new roads should be subject to achieving minimum safety ratings.
The Karnataka State Highway Improvement Project (KSHIP) in India provides a good example of how Star Ratings are being used to design safer roads:
This process resulted in designs with significantly better Star Ratings than the existing roads. For example, the percentage of road rated one-star or two-stars for vehicle occupants reduced from 86% to 2%. It was estimated that the new designs would result in 55% fewer deaths and serious injuries than currently occur.
A project in the Republic of Moldova produced similarly impressive results. With the support of the MCC, the Global Road Safety Facility and engineers from URS Corporation and Universinj, designs that particularly focused on pedestrians in villages increased the percentage of road rated four-stars from 8% to 84%. Final designs were estimated to reduce risk of deaths and serious injuries by 40%.
