Indexing the Maintenance Priority of Road Safety Barriers in Urban and Peri-Urban Contexts: Application of a Ranking Methodology in Bologna, Italy

The need for clear and updated information is pivotal when authorities plan and perform routinary, periodic and emergency maintenance of both road network and their roadside assets, e.g., curbs, signals, and barriers. With particular regard to road barriers, the development of remote sensing technologies, such as Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), has played a disruptive role in acquiring information, so the surveys today are predominantly automatic, faster, and less biased than the traditional (i.e., visual and manual) inventorying methodologies. However, even though they are accurate, these emerging procedures usually focus only on the surveyed elements and do not provide any other information about the surrounding environment or about the qualitative degradation of the elements. The primary objective of this research effort was to present a ranking methodology for enhancing road safety in urban contexts. Due to an innovative synthetic index which takes into account both the deterioration and the location of the surveyed elements, maintenance priority of road barriers was outlined in Bologna, Italy. All the collected information was georeferenced in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment and hence plotted in thematic maps for an easier analysis. In addition, compliance to the norm was verified. The research was tested to provide public authorities with an effective tool in the evaluation of maintenance activities and road safety policies.