Building New Partnerships to Improve Road Safety Risk

In 2012 New Zealand's KiwiRAP partners (NZ Automobile Association, NZ Transport Agency, NZ Police, Ministry of Transport, Accident Compensation Corporation), in conjunction with Auckland Transport, Tauranga City, Christchurch City and Dunedin City, took part in a national trial to more fully understand the extent of the crash problem on the urban network. As part of this trial, the successful KiwiRAP crash risk methodology was developed further for use in the analysis of the urban network and entitled Urban KiwiRAP, The Urban KiwiRAP methodology confirms that, generally, approximately 50% of death and serious injury crashes are occurring on around 10% of the urban roading network in each of the trial local authority areas. To address death and serious injury costs and numbers by putting tools in place to identify the greatest risk of occurrence was a very new approach to injury prevention for the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), This organisation generally approached injury prevention from a behaviour change perspective. Changing the lens on the way injury prevention is addressed has opened the doors for new opportunities to partner with Local Authorities in the roading infrastructure space; a new direction for ACC. This paper discusses the next steps in rolling out this new methodology to a group of Local Authority roading partners and the positive benefits that are expected from both the newly developed partnerships and the use of the Urban KiwiRAP methodology.