IRF-Washington and IRF-Brussels support the mandated use of roadside safety features that meets state of the art testing for today’s vehicle fleet on every road around the world. In Europe, road authorities are required to use products that meet EN 1317. In the United States, products must meet the NCHRP 350 standards. Both of these testing criteria have been developed over years and they are proven to be good methods of verifying the performance of a roadside safety feature. Counties that require the use of products that meet one of these specifications can be assured their road safety money is being wisely spent on a product that will perform properly when impacted.
Road authorities in countries that do not have updated or adequate roadside safety feature specifications should use either the European EN 1317 or the American NCHRP 350 criteria or both of them when developing roadside safety hardware performance specifications. The development of specifications outside NCHRP 350 and EN1317 would be both time consuming and expensive and would not produce better safety hardware at a cheaper price. The EN1317 and the NCHRP 350 criteria have proved to be very effective. Allowing products that meet either criterion will give the local road authorities more product options thereby reducing project costs.
During their meeting on January 14, 2008, the following proposal was approved unanimously by the AFB 20(2) Roadside Safety Design Subcommittee on International Research Activities for those countries currently not required to use NCHRP 350 or EN 1317 criteria to create performance specifications for their roadside safety features.
"The AFB20(2) Roadside Safety Design Subcommittee on International Research Activities recommends that road authorities in all countries should only specify roadside safety hardware, (i.e. longitudinal safety barriers, crash cushions, terminals and transitions) that has met either NCHRP 350 or EN 1317 criteria (or their updates.)"
The IRF (Washington and Brussels) support and endorse this statement and encourage every road authority around the world to implement this policy. Spending money wisely to use current, proven state of the art technology, products and concepts will help to make the roads safer and better.
4 comments:
I agree with the statement that state of the art technology should be used by every country, but this may be too expensive for developing nations.
Also, the statement that developing standards other than the EN1317 or NCHRP 350 would be expensive, time consuming and would not produce better results tends to indicate that there should be no further research in this area, and I'm sure that was not the message.
I believe that the intent is that these countries at least meet the MINIMUM standards of protection afforded by US or European standards.
The IRF recommendation and support for the use of the products that meets the EN1317 or NCHRP 350 standard is welcome, particularly for developing countries.
However, there is need for an aggresive communication of the information to the practitioners in these countries. My observations over time revealed that many of the practitioners are either not professionals and do not have required information to specify such products.
The term "Passive Safety" for "Roadside Safety" is extremely aggravating to me and others, especially when applied to breakaway devices. It sounds like you can take it or leave it. It sounds like these safety features are incidental and that they are not on the front burner.
NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH.
We must actively pursue the use of these roadside safety features all around the world.
I realize that “passive safety” refers to how these products actually work because they are only activated when they are needed to reduce the severity of the incident, but we need to avoid a misconception in the marketplace. We should be using “Roadside Safety" - part of the FORGIVING Roadway” and we should be actively promoting this concept.
Arthur Dinitz
Transpo Industries
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