Application of Highway Safety Manual to Italian divided multilane highways

In the framework of the EU Directive on Road Infrastructure Safety Management, this paper will focus on 'ranking of high accident concentration sections', analyzing the opportunity to adopt the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) approach. With this goal, a pilot project of network screening for Italian motorways using HSM is presented. The more appropriate HSM procedures are selected and calibrated taking into account Italian national factors. Results are evaluated using as comparison Safety Performance Functions (SPF), developed directly with data for the specific Italian road infrastructure, which is assumed to provide more reliable estimates than HSM calibration. (C) 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of SIIV2012 Scientific Committee