The Significance of Developing A New Black Spot Safety Management Approach for The Local Road Traffic Nature of Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

Road networks always have inherent levels of risk. Whenever a person is driving on a roadway, the risk of being involved in a collision exists. This situation became worse with a poor safety engineering road network as in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). In HCMC, every year, there are more than one thousand deaths and approximately ten thousand road users were injured due to road traffic accidents. Until now, in Vietnam, there has been almost no road safety method used in management of road network safety. This paper was intended to propose an approach of black spot safety management suitable for local road traffic nature of HCMC. The approach developed is based on the Network Safety Management (BASt & Sétra, 2005). The methodology employed in the approach focuses on the traffic volume and the severity of accidents within the road network and the evaluation of the accidents on the basis of accident cost rates. The comparison of actual accident cost with a hypothetical estimated base accident cost provides information on safety potential (SAPO) of spots. The SAPO is the most important parameter to identify black spots on which safety improvement measures are expected to have the greatest effect. Furthermore, some concepts and definitions related to the approach are also described in detail.