Traffic Management and Infrastructure - Lessons from In-depth Crash Investigations

This report discusses infrastructure and traffic management issues identified in an examination of approximately 700 crash investigations conducted in metropolitan and rural areas of South Australia. Current traffic management and engineering practices are doing much to reduce the frequency and severity of road crashes, but most judgments on effectiveness are based on traffic crash data routinely collected by the police. While this data may be adequate for aggregate analyses of crashes occurring on the road network in general, they tend to lack detail about factors that contribute to the causation and consequences of crashes. This is especially the case for factors that relate to road infrastructure and traffic management or system failures. The Centre for Automotive Safety Research (and the Road Accident Research Unit before it) has a long history of conducting in-depth crash investigation dating back to the 1970s.