TRAFFESSIONALS staff have been involved with traffic safety work since 1993, with extensive experience with safety audits, peer reviews, crash blackspot studies, route studies, and all sorts of safety improvement projects from preliminary investigations through to detail design, from low speed urban to high speed rural highway and motorway environments.

Practical measures to improve safety in urban areas can include traffic islands, roundabouts, traffic signals, road marking and signage, improved street lighting, considerations of road surface and superelevation, and not least of all attempting to address driver behaviour.  This last element may involve Local Area Traffic Management measures such as speed platforms or humps, but can also be achieved by certain elements of Urban Design that encourage appropriate speeds.  Safety works on high speed roads may include some of these elements, but involve subtler considerations of driver behaviour along with application of Clear Zones and various vehicle safety barrier systems if absolutely necessary.  TRAFFESSIONALS have extensive experience with all these aspects of roadway design, and are well familiar with the Safe Systems approach to road safety which is a key element of the New Zealand Transport Agency’s road safety strategy 2010-20.  One of the strategies key objectives is: ‘to ensure that in the event of a crash, the impact energies remain below the threshold likely to produce either death or serious injury’.

Some interesting safety projects of involvement include:

• Detail design road safety audit of a 6 kilometre Off-road Cycle path facility in South Dunedin (2013).

• Crash Blackspot study for Piha Road in West Auckland (2011).

• Project management and design for Waitakere City Council’s minor safety budget 2006 – 2010 with an annual budget of approximately $1.2M.  Projects were up to $250K each and included roundabouts, traffic signals, Local Area Traffic Management, bend reshaping, safety barriers, and traffic islands.

St Lukes Road / Wagener Place traffic signals

• St Lukes Road / Wagener Place intersection in St Lukes, Auckland (2000), which was signalised from the previous priority control for safety and pedestrian amenity reasons, but also to include a new facility for buses to undertake ‘U’ turns.

Shelley Beach Road, Ponsonby

• Shelley Beach Road in Ponsonby, Auckland (1999), which included motorway off-ramp threshold islands, along with a downstream pedestrian crossing doubling as a road narrowing feature to address a bend with previous crash problems.