Road safety audits are proactive - they try to identify safety issues in a road design. The objective here is accident/crash prevention. Road crash investigations are reactive - they examine known crash sites and use crash data to develop cost-effective countermeasures. The objective here is accident/crash reduction. Every student may have same road safety engineering skills and experience are needed for each process, but it is important to recognize that they are different processes and they produce different deliverables. Student involved under safety-conscious road research will therefore include both the blackspot investigation programme and the road safety audit process within its assigned project evaluation. A road safety audit is "a formal, systematic and detailed examination of a road project by an independent and qualified team of auditors (here students*) that leads to a report of the potential safety concerns in the project." A formal examination of design would not permit a layout shown below causing unsafe and illegitimate movement. Such potential unsafe situations would be captured in a safety audit under research paper by student.
