There are two types of road safety engineering schemes:

Each year the County Council produces a list of sites on the County's road network where there have been four or more personal injury collisions in the last three years. These sites are known as collision cluster sites and are reported to the County Council Area Committees as part of the annual collision statistics report.

Investigations into the sites contained on the list are undertaken and any suitable/cost effective remedial measures put forward for implementation. These road safety engineering measures are funded through the Integrated Transport Capital Programme. We also investigate routes where there is a constant personal injury collision problem.

Review of effectiveness

Having carried out the analysis work, identified road collision problems and implemented solutions, a monitoring system must be established to measure the effectiveness of our safety engineering work.

A monitoring system will enable overall collision trends in an area to be compared with national trends. Monitoring also provides the justification for continuing with the same collision reduction strategy or will indicate the need to reassess the strategy and the basis on which decisions to adopt a particular remedy are taken.

Road Safety Engineering Schemes in North Yorkshire are monitored to determine their success to:

• ensure that, if a collision situation worsens following implementation of a measure, further steps are taken quickly to reverse the situation.
• quantify the change in the collisions and to find out whether there is any change over time in the effectiveness of the treatment.
• evaluate the benefits of the scheme in relation to the original scheme objectives.

North Yorkshire County Council carry out three types of monitoring:

1. Personal injury collision records are compared for the period prior to the implementation of a scheme with the period following the implementation of the scheme. This enables us to determine whether there has been a reduction in annual accident rate.
2. Compare the collision reduction to other similar sites to determine whether the reduction has been due to the implemented scheme or whether its due to and overall reduction in accidents countywide.
3. Before and after speed surveys are undertaken on traffic calming schemes and give an early indication of the potential success of the scheme.