The International Road Assessment Programme

The International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) was established to help tackle the devastating social and economic burden of road crashes. Without intervention, the number of deaths worldwide is projected to increase to some 1.8 million by 2020. The majority of this growth would occur in low-income and middle-income countries. Road safety engineering makes a direct contribution to the reduction of road death and injury. iRAP has developed globally-consistent protocols to assess and improve the safety of roads worldwide. The focus of this paper is on star ratings and safer roads investment plans. These two protocols are designed to be applied in low-income and middle-income countries where detailed, location-specific crash data is often not readily available.