DPWH conducts road safety audit
The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is now halfway through its process to conduct safety audits on all roads in the country, a move to lessen future road crashes.
In a forum Tuesday, Engineer Jonathan Araullo, assistant director of the Bureau of Quality and Safety of the DPWH, disclosed that 58 percent of the national roads in the Philippines have been subjected to safety audits.
The measure, according to Araullo, is a system for the treatment of accident-prone areas through conducting Accident Blackspot Investigation.
Its objective is to reduce the incidence or severity of major accidents at the worst accident locations, Araullo said.
According to the official, the DPWH, under the Philippine Road Safety Action Plan, was tasked to implement measures in safe designs of roads particularly on the more than 32, 000 km of national roads.
“To keep up with this responsibility, we intend to deliver safer roads thru processes consisting of proactive and reactive approaches designed to prevent and reduce the occurrence of road crashes,” Araullo said.
“By 2020, we are looking at figures of 1,300 blackspots nationwide being treated projected to generate 27 percent casualty accident savings over 20 years,” Araullo added.
The general principle of safe road designs, according to Araullo, is to make sure that the road users remain safely on the road by ensuring that the road has sufficient width, sound road surface, predictable alignment, and good delineation and signing.
“However, we recognize that at some point in time, drivers will commit mistakes, will somehow lose control of the vehicle and eventually run off the road. When that situation happens, it is important that roadside must also be so designed to have forgiving features, free of hazards or with roadsides treatments that would prevent an errant vehicle from directly hitting the hazard,” Araullo said.
“The provision of road safety countermeasures on the road and roadsides aim to reduce the severity of impact at a level that will not constitute fatalities or serious injuries,” he added.
Araullo disclosed that the DPWH has also adopted safety design standards innovations to keep up with its task to road safety.
The agency uses non-intrusive test equipment like retroreflectometers for road signs and pavement markings, and road surface profilometer.
It also uses safer end terminals for guardrails such as bullnose and eccentric loader breakaway cable terminal.
The DPWH also constructs pedestrian refuge for wide carriageway and high speed road sections.
A roadworks safety assessment team (RSAT) was also created in 2016 to monitor the compliance and promote awareness among implementing offices and contractors on the various aspects of roadworks safety and traffic management during construction.