This report has involved a comprehensive review of current Road Safety Audit Manuals and Guidelines from a range of different countries to establish current practices and considers previous international reviews to determine key areas where additional guidance is required, or exemplar practice is well established. Initial consideration was given to the core issues facing many countries regarding implementing a comprehensive audit system. These included:

• Variability of situations across LMICs
• Traffic mix and main crash types
• Vehicle condition
• Driver competency, compliance and use of infrastructure
• Increasing motorisation and modal changes
• Rapid infrastructure expansion
• Low number of experienced road safety auditors/inspectors.
• Capacity of road safety engineers and designers to deal with recommendations arising from Road Safety Audit
• Economic pressures and the need for cost benefit analyses.
• Variation in design standards
• The importance of early intervention and land use planning
• Road user behavior
• Legal environment and enforcement

Several reviews of international experience in Road Safety Audit have been undertaken over recent years and these were considered before examining a wide range of manuals and guidelines from across most continents.

Many of these documents draw upon very similar principles and content, having been developed by international road safety experts. For example, the International RSA manuals and those from countries such as Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania and Ethiopia are all very similar in layout and content. It is often only the degree of detail that varies.  Similarly, whilst there are differences in approach between US and other manuals, their layout and process are all very similar.

Therefore, for the reporting of the review, best examples and those that offer some difference in approach were selected.  This means that the manuals selected for detailed review provide the best representation of different approaches available that will together be most useful in the context of LMICs. These were then used to highlight areas in the current PIARC manual that could be improved to assist LMICs in developing their own comprehensive approach to RSA and RSI.

It is clear that some areas of the current PIARC Road Safety Audit Guidelines for Safety Checks on New Road Projects (2011) needs need to be updated and additional sections included to provide exemplary guidance to LMICs.