A decision tool for analysing road safety problems of pedestrians

Cyclists, pedestrians and powered tow wheelers represent the most vulnerable road user especially in urban area: in 2005 almost 4000 pedestrians were killed in road accidents in EU-15. In Italy pedestrian casualties are not diminishing as they should according to the general trend of road casualties. On the contrary, the figures for accidents in 2005 were worse than those of 2004. Road infrastructure is one of the main risk factors: high speed, geometry, sight obstructions often cause accidents that can be grouped in typical scenarios, related to road characteristics and infrastructural problems. There is a tremendous need of improving safety for pedestrian in urban areas, as a mean of improving public space liveable conditions . In the 80s the French Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Sécurité (INREST) developed the definition of “typical accident scenarios”: this technique is based on the analyse of Police accidents reports occurred in an area, in order to classify their temporal and casual development, describing the four phases of: driving situation, accident situation, emergency situation and the collision. Every group of accidents which have particular similarities constitutes a scenario, and for every scenario some solutions can be proposed promising to be more effective due to the better comprehension of phenomena. Some types of typical accident scenarios already exist in literature, especially for crashes to cars, pedestrians powered tow-wheelers, but there is still a few related to pedestrian fatalities. The idea is then to assess the use of typical accident scenarios implemented in a user friendly e-book, in order to study appropriate recommendation to prevent the specific type of accident. The paper aims to present the structure of the e-book, showing the decision tree that leads user to one or several solution proposal for a given safety problem. After a brief presentation of the tool, the results of the assessment with technical staff of several cities in Europe will be reported in the paper.