Monitoring and evaluating infrastructure safety deficiencies towards integrated road safety improvement in Indonesia Mulyono, A. T. 1 , Kushari B. 2 , Agustin J. 3 1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Gadjah Mada University; 2 Faculty of Civil Engineering and Planning, Islamic University of Indonesia; 3 Directorate General of Highway Administration (Bina Marga), Ministry of Public Works E-mail: pustral-ugm@indo.net.id, atm8002@yahoo.com, berliann@ftsp.uii.ac.id Abstract The Road Infrastructure Safety Management System (RSIMS) has been recently developed by Indonesian Highway Administration (Bina Marga) to minimize the number and the impact of accidents caused by road environment deficiencies. This paper explores the development of the RSIMS and one of its activities, namely Road Safety Inspection (RSI) to monitor and evaluate safety performance of operating roads. A set of RSI guidelines has been developed to facilitate the mapping of deficiencies and hazards. As the first trial series, safety inspection using the guidelines had been carried out along a 30 km national road section in Ngawi, East Java Province. Risk evaluation was performed upon discovered deficiencies in order to suggest necessary responses and treatments. RSI is expected to produce important inputs for integrated infrastructure safety management, i.e. (1) deficiency mapping and database, (2) safety audit prioritization, and (3) programming treatments to overcome safety deficiencies. Keywords RSIMS, Road Safety Inspection, road environment deficiencies, risk evaluation Introduction At the end of 2006, Bina Marga, the Indonesian Highway Administration managed to finish a preparation study [1] on how it should contribute to road safety improvement in the country. The study was carried out following a growing attention from the society on the country’s alarming traffic accident record. It was estimated that in 2004 alone accidents had caused 30,000 deaths, and costed an economic loss of Rp 41 billions or about 2.91% of Indonesian GDP [2]. The study points out the Asian Development Bank (ADB)’s 14 sectors of intervention that should be taken to comprehensively reduce accident [3]. Among the interventions, it urges Bina Marga to participate actively in four courses of action, including coordination and road safety management, development of accident database system, social campaign, and road safety research. It further recommends Bina Marga to take the leading role in two other initiatives, namely planning for safer roads and eliminating hazardous locations, as the two are within Bina Marga’s domain as road infrastructure authority. While no local study has been conducted to closely examine the contribution of road environment factors towards the current accident trends, international experiences suggest that the factors may be responsible to cause some 30 to 40% of all accidents. To name but a few, Treat et al. [4] at earlier time in the USA found out that in total (either as the sole contributing factor or in combination with human and vehicle factors) road environment was responsible for causing 44.2% out of the 2,000 accident cases studied. Interestingly, human-road interaction was found to contribute in 34.8% of the cases. Using Australian data, in 2002 AUSTROADS [5] also noted that road factors involved in some 28% of accident cases. Drawing from these experiences and realizing that there has been no organized effort to ensure safety aspects to be seriously considered throughout road development phases, Bina Marga took the recommended roles by first developing the Road Infrastructure Safety Management System (RISMS). Another study [6] was then conducted in 2007 to structure such a management system and its components. In this paper, the initial development of the Indonesian RISMS is highlighted and discussed. The discussion is also extended to cover the first field trial of an activity organized in the RISMS, namely This paper has been peer-reviewed November 2008, Adelaide, South Australia 2008 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference 540