Saving Lives Through Safer Roads
August 2016
W.D.M. Limited has been surveying the road network annually in New Zealand since 1995, helping deliver remarkable reductions in road casualty rates and resulting in further developments of its SCRIM® vehicle through the addition of the latest ITS programming.
Skid resistance of road surfaces is one of the primary factors that determine the safety of roads and the wet skid injury crash rate on road sections with “low” skid resistance is 4.5 to 9 times greater than that for all roads.
Results of crash site analysis indicate that a 0.1 increase in skid resistance (measured in terms of Mean Summer SCRIM® Coefficient, MSSC) causes a reduction in injury crashes of 30% on wet roads & 20% on dry roads for the New Zealand state highway network. Overall, since SCRIM® surveys were introduced, the number of skid related fatalities in New Zealand has fallen by nearly 40%.
The social costs of crashes recorded in the New Zealand Transport Agency’s Economic Evaluation Manual (2010) are: rural fatal $3.881M, rural serious injury $680,000, rural minor injury $83,000. By helping prevent 250 crashes the monetary benefits have been $159.5M.
Click here to see how New Zealand’s TV Channel, ONE News, reported the survey operation.
* SCRIM® vehicle is the registered trade mark of W.D.M. Limited
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