What is a Road Safety Audit?

A Road Safety Audit (RSA) is defined by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Road Safety Audits Guidelines as "a formal safety performance examination of an existing or future road or intersection by an independent audit team". The RSA is a way of doing business to identify road safety issues as well as opportunities for safety improvements for all road users. The RSA includes the following elements:

• It is performed by an independent team
• It is performed by a multi-disciplined team
• It considers all potential road users
• It accounts for road user capabilities and limitations
• It generates a formal report
• It requires a response from the project owner

In summary, the RSA is a proactive, formal examination that focuses on road safety, which is conducted by a multi-disciplinary team independent of the project owner (or the requester of the study). The audit team must be adequately qualified individually and as a team. The RSA is qualitative in nature, although crash data, traffic data, and analyses are necessary, and the safety of all road users and facilities are considered. The RSA report includes average daily traffic volume counts, manual turning movement counts and level-of-service analysis, crash data compilation and analyses, and intersection warrant analyses for traffic signal and multi-way stop control implementation. The project owner will take the initiative for action and implementation of the proposed recommendations made by the support team. The recommendations will consist of a number of alternatives (or combination of actions) including short term, less expensive actions and long term, more costly alternatives. OCPC is available to assist with acquiring state and federal grants and funding for projects, as projects draw on a combination of funding sources.