Ripcord Iserest:
In 2001 the European Commission adopted the Transport White Paper,
which contains the European transport policy for 2010. This pointed
out the way for a new European Road Safety Action Programme out of
which emerged the 6th Framework Programme for Research,
Technology Development and Demonstration (2002-2006) and the first
calls for proposals. One of them was the proposal for RIPCORD-ISEREST.
The target that the EU had proposed was to reduce the number of
fatalities on European roads by 50% from over 50.000 in 2001 to
25.000 in 2010.
To reach this objective the improvement or implementation of a great
variety of safety measures is still urgent. Beside the ongoing
development processes in the field of car safety there is also the
need to exhaust the reduction potentials of road infrastructure
safety measures.
Road infrastructure related safety measures offer a large potential
that could be exploited for a significant reduction of road
accidents and their consequences. Considering that most casualties
occur on single carriageway rural roads, RIPCORD-ISEREST and SEROES
focus on road infrastructure measures for this type of roads.
Researchers and practitioners in the member states of the European Union
have made great efforts to improve traffic safety. Many of these
approaches have already led to a significant reduction in fatalities.
The objective of RIPCORD-ISEREST is to collect and to evaluate these
approaches in order to make them accessible throughout Europe and to
develop tools, which could be used to improve traffic safety.
With these tools RIPCORD-ISEREST intends to give scientific support
to practitioners concerned with road design and traffic safety in
Europe.
SEROES - The best practice safety information expert system for
secondary roads:
One of the objectives of RIPCORD-ISEREST was the development of a Best
Practice Safety Information Expert System (SEROES) based on an
inventory of best practice information about road safety improvement
gathered from all EU-member states and a worldwide international
background. SEROES focuses on secondary roads safety information,
which is merely qualitative in nature.
This knowledge resulted in an application intended to be used as a base
of decision making within a safety oriented management system. It is
designed as a source of recommendations for safety auditors and
safety inspection.
SEROES provides a free-accessible database for road authorities
responsible for secondary roads containing the Best Practice Safety
Information Expert System. SEROES is an online application that
helps to find effective road safety measures and to make decisions,
focusing on single carriageway rural roads.
