Roadside safety audit for three expressway facilities in China

At the request of the World Bank, a roadside safety audit was conducted for three existing expressways in Jiangxi Province, China, with an aim to developing safer roadside safety designs for the World Bank funded Ruijin - Ganzhou Expressway (RGE) project in Jiangxi Province. On top of a routine road safety audit process, traffic collision records for roadside safety crashes were analyzed to supplement the qualitative auditing suggestions. The performance of Chinese roadside barrier designs was also evaluated based on a comparison with their counterparts in the United States. Several critical issues were identified and countermeasures recommended. First of all, it was found that the current Chinese highway design standard is silent about the dimension specifications of roadside clear recovery zone (CRZ), which does not lend itself to safe roadside safety design. Second, it was realized that the existing roadside barriers are not strong enough to protect the heavy trucks from running off the road. In addition, some roadside obstacles are found to be unprotected or un-treated, such as barrier ends, and drainage ditches. Based on these observations, pertinent countermeasures for each issue were discussed in detail in this paper, and a roadside safety audit report was generated for the Jiangxi Provincial Communications Department to guide the RGE project roadside design.