Kenngineering Notes: Creating the Safe Roads 101 course

I spent a good bit of the start of this year shaping up a Safe Roads 101 training course.

Bringing back a course that builds a foundation of road safety engineering fundamentals.

And it was great this week to roll it out to a group of keen, engaged and bright practitioners (with a few experienced hands in there using it as a refresher… looking at you Dev Vagel & Mark Simionato).

Brilliant group. Plenty of discussion. Lots of thoughtful questions.
(and it was fantastic to have two brilliant road safety practitioners there to assist with the rollout: Carly Hunter & Brayden McHeim)

So what topics ended up making the cut?:

• What is road safety engineering? – including how the discipline has evolved and how it connects with others
• The Safe System approach and what it actually means in practice
• Safe System elements and the difference between crash causes and solutions
• Crash forces and severity (what the human body can tolerate)
• Assessing Safe System alignment (exposure, likelihood, severity)
• Crash types (DCAs, RUM codes) and contributing factors
• Safe System aligned treatments (including some newer and emerging approaches)
• Self explaining roads and human factors in design
• Risk assessment tools and frameworks (AusRAP, IRR, RSA, SSA, NSP)
• Treating high risk locations (data, interpretation, treatment selection, BCR, NSP) & how do we look at and treat systemic risk
• How standards and safety requirements intersect
• Future vehicles and emerging technology (and what that means for infrastructure)
• Speed setting and its direct link to safety outcomes
• Evaluating performance and effectiveness
• Fatal crash reviews and lessons learned

It is always a balance… what to include? What to leave out? How deep to go?

Great to see this one up and running.

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