TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2017//
TI  - Investigating the influence on safety of retrofitting Italian motorways with barriers meeting a new EU standard
JO  - Traffic injury prevention
A1  - Cafiso, Salvatore
A1  - D'Agostino, Carmelo
A1  - Persaud, Bhagwant N.
SP  - 324
EP  - 329
VL  - 18
IS  - 3
N2  - A new European Union (EU) regulation for safety barriers, which is based on performance, has encouraged road agencies to perform an upgrade of old barriers, with the expectation that there will be safety benefits at the retrofitted sites. The new class of barriers was designed and installed in compliance with the 1998 (European Norm) EN 1317 standards for road restraint systems, which lays down common requirements for the testing and certification of road restraint systems in all countries of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). Both the older and new barriers are made of steel and are installed in such a way as to avoid vehicle intrusion, but the older ones are thought to be only effective at low speeds and large angles of impact. The new standard seeks to remedy this by providing better protection at higher speeds. The paper seeks to quantify the effect on the frequency of fatal+injury crashes of retrofitting motorways with barriers meeting the new standards, by performing an empirical Bayes before-after analysis based on data from the A18 Messina-Catania motorway in Italy. The results confirm that there is a safety benefit for ran off road crashes and no benefit for other crashes. The magnitude of this benefit indicates that the retrofits are cost-effective even for total crashes and should continue in any European country.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1538-9588
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2016.1203424
ID  - ref1
ER  -