About AusRAP.
The Australian Road Assessment Program is a program run by the Australian Automobile Association and State and Territory automobile clubs, dedicated to saving lives through advocating for safer road infrastructure.
AusRAP is part of the International Road Assessment Program (iRAP), a worldwide movement to improve the safety of our roads and a proud supporter of the Decade of Action for Road Safety, a global plan to reduce the number of road deaths worldwide.
AusRAP is committed to:
- reducing deaths and injuries on Australia's roads by systematically assessing risk and identifying safety shortcomings that can be addressed with practical road improvement measures; and
- putting risk assessment at the heart of strategic decisions on road improvements, crash protection and standards of road management.
AusRAP works in partnership with government and non-government organisations to:
- inspect national and state highways and develop Star Ratings and Safer Roads Investment Plans;
- track road safety performance through risk maps so that funding agencies can assess the benefits of their investments; and
- explain the benefits of safer road infrastructure to the community by describing why some roads are safer than others.
AusRAP currently uses two methods - or protocols - for assessing the safety of roads. The first protocol, Risk Mapping, is based on a road's history of casualty crashes and traffic flow and provides a measure of the safety performance of a road. Risk maps have been produced for the National Highway Network (formerly AusLink National Network), on which road crash fatalities typically account for around 15 per cent of annual road fatalities in Australia.
AusRAP's second protocol provides a Star Rating, measuring the inherent safety of the road infrastructure - that is, the degree to which it prevents crashes from occurring and reduces the severity of those crashes which do occur. Star Rating involves an inspection of a number of design elements such as lane and shoulder width and the presence of safety barriers, which are known to have an impact on the likelihood of a crash and its severity.
Between one and five stars are awarded to sections of roads measuring the level of safety which is 'built-in' to the road. AusRAP has produced Star Ratings for the National Highway Network and significant lengths of the state highway network in Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia.
In 2011, AusRAP will introduce two new protocols. The first of these, based on Star Ratings, will provide a measure of the investment required to improve the level of infrastructure safety, know as Safer Road Investment Plans. The second will utilise Risk Maps to benchmark the safety performance of a road over time and is known as Performance Tracking.