Road safety audits
Why audit a road before anyone crashes on it
A road safety audit is a formal, independent examination of a road or design for potential safety problems. Done in 3D, it finds what plans and drive-throughs miss.
What a road safety audit is
A road safety audit (RSA) is a formal examination of a future or existing road by a qualified, independent, multidisciplinary team, looking for conditions that could lead to crashes. The audit considers every road user: drivers, pedestrians, cyclists and transit. It is proactive: it asks what could go wrong, rather than counting what already has.
Traditional audits rely on plan sheets, site visits and the auditors' experience. That is thorough where the team looks and blind where it does not. Sight distance in particular depends on the full three-dimensional shape of the road and everything beside it, which is exactly what a drawing flattens.
Why crash data is not enough
Crash-based safety programs are reactive by construction: a location earns attention only after enough people have been hurt there. For a new design there is no crash history at all. That gap is not academic — road crashes kill more than 38,000 people a year on US roads and injure another 4.4 million seriously enough to need medical attention. Road Safety Audit 3D analyzes the geometry itself, so a substandard sight line is found on the first day, not after the first fatality.
New designs and existing roads
For designs, the audit runs on the CAD model before anything is built, so fixes are cheap. For existing roads, a LiDAR scan captures the road, the terrain, the vegetation and the structures as they are today, and the same analysis shows which curves, crests and intersections fail the standard right now.
What you gain
Before construction
A deficiency found on a design model costs a revision. Once a road is in service, the same fix means reconstruction, or worse — the throwaway and rebuild costs an audit avoids in the first place.
Without crash history
Crash data tells you where people were already hurt. A proactive audit finds the locations that have not had their crash yet, which matters when road crashes remain the leading cause of death in the US for people aged 1-54.
Systemic, not spot checks
Every lane, every direction, every intersection is analyzed the same way, so nothing depends on which stations a reviewer chose.
Defensible
Each finding cites the standard, the parameter and the 3D geometry that failed it, which stands up in a design review or a courtroom.
Read how it works on the Road Safety Audit 3D page, or see the Michigan State University sight distance study.
Audit a road or a design
Bring a design file or a scan. We'll show you the findings on your own project.