Presentation of the RSI

With the Itinerary Road Safety Inspection (RSI) approach, the French government aimed to design a simple and practical method for improving road safety over the national road network.

These inspections form one of the four pillars of the future European directive concerning the management of road infrastructure safety (and which will be applicable over the European network - TERN). The other three pillars are:
- upstream impact studies for projects;
- road safety audits for all new road projects;
- specific steps to improve the safety of existing roads.


A technical guide defines the methodology for carrying out these itinerary road safety inspections. The inspection visits, which are the core of this approach, are described and tools suggested. Visits must be made by appropriately qualified personnel who take a fresh look at the situation ; i.e. people who are not familiar with the itinerary and who are better able to observe the particularities of the road and the roadside than local road operators who no longer see them.


In order to refine this inspection methodology, on-site experiments were carried out. The contributions from them were very much appreciated by local road operators , both for the pertinence of the observations and as a tool for team dialog and management. Concretely, they showed that on-site reports lead, in the vast majority of cases, to actions that are easy to implement at costs that can be included within a normal budget. Finally, inspections reveal the network service quality and provide an indicator to be followed in each new inspection.

As decided by the Inter-ministerial Committee for Road Safety (ICRS) on 13 February 2008, these inspections will be carried out periodically over the entire national road network starting in 2009 and will be repeated every three years.

Road safety inspections are part of a global, coherent and shared policy of road infrastructure safety intended to lower accident rates on French roads.