Adapting the Road Safety Audit Review for Local Rural Roads (MPC ...

engineers audited their own roads and those of the other county engineer. The county engineerswere familiar with the classification issues and both also had attended an RSA specialtyworkshop held in 1998. When all the appropriate data were collected, a comparative analysiswas conducted using percentage and weighted percentage of agreement to identify the differenteffects of auditor skill and urgency of improvement identifications.ResultsThe percent of agreement analysis indicated that the combined decisions of the twoengineers (hypothetical team) identified the largest number of safety issues that also wereidentified by the control group. In the first field audit, all groups had a closer agreement for thehigher roadway classifications (local rural major and minor subclasses). In the second fieldaudit, the closest results were obtained for the rural major medium-speed and rural minor roadclassifications. The results were specifically close in the evaluation of roadside features, roadsurface, and intersections and approaches categories of safety needs. Contained in the ExecutiveSummary attachment is a “Look For” list of the subcategories of safety issues. This attachmentalso contains the recommended complete RSAR process for rural local governments. The nextstep is to implement improvements that address the results of the RSAR. To accomplish thisobjective, a short factual proactive report is a potentially needed tool to secure funding and tohelp the county transportation agency. A sample of such a report is contained in the ExecutiveSummary attachment. The final step is to learn from these improvements by evaluating theireffectiveness over time.The weighted percent of agreement analysis used only the highest safety severity issues.In the first county, results of the engineers considered as a team were close to matching the13