Road Ratings
The Australian Road Assessment Program (AusRAP) is an initiative of the Australian Automobile Association (AAA), which is the national association of Australia's State and Territory motoring clubs.
AusRAP is a sister program to the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), which crash-tests new cars and awards them stars for safety. AusRAP produces maps showing the risk of road crashes that cause deaths and life-threatening injuries and rates roads for safety. It highlights improvements that could be made to roads to reduce the likelihood of crashes—and to make those that do happen survivable.
The aim of AusRAP is to provide a safety rating for roads across Australia. This will generate consumer information for the public and give road engineers and planners vital benchmarking information to show them how well, or badly, their roads are performing compared with others, both in their own and other countries.
AusRAP’s objectives are:
- to reduce deaths and injuries on Australia’s roads by systematically assessing risk and identifying safety shortcomings that can be addressed with practical road-improvement measures; and
- to put risk assessment at the heart of strategic decisions on road improvements, crash protection and standards of road management.
AusRAP uses two methods – protocols – for assessing the safety of roads. The first protocol, risk mapping, is based on a road’s history of casualty crashes and traffic flow. Previous AusRAP reports, released in 2004 and 2005, used risk-maps to provide a measure of the safety performance of the AusLink National Network. Road crash fatalities on this network typically account for around 15 per cent of annual road fatalities in Australia.
AusRAP’s second protocol provides a star rating for safety. The star ratings involve an inspection of a number of design elements such as lane and shoulder width and the presence of safety barriers, which are known to have an impact on the likelihood of a crash and its severity. Between 1 and 5-stars are awarded to road links depending on the level of safety which is ‘built-in’ to the road. The star ratings do not take into account a road’s crash history.