Safety in tran­sportati­on

A chief priority is ensuring that roads, and their surroundings, are made safer so that human error in traffic is less likely to result in serious accidents.

Emphasis is put on ensuring that all modes of transport fulfil quality and safety standards with the separation of pedestrian, and other traffic on roads and paths.

The IRCA’s projects are subject to traffic safety management, which centers around adherence to a determined methodology, that ranks traffic safety as a key priority, when preparing and laying new roads as well as when assessing roads which have not yet opened to traffic.

Traffic velocity is an important risk factor when considering traffic safety.

Traffic velocity is a primary cause in a large number of accidents, and often determines their consequences, i.e. the greater the velocity at time of accident, the more severe the consequences become.

Automatic speeding surveillance is a large part of the current government’s traffic safety plan. The IRCA is responsible for the technical execution of this surveillance, but the National Police Commissioner is responsible for administering tickets and collecting speeding fines.

The IRCA is provided with traffic collision information from the Icelandic Transport Authority, which documents accidents through police reports and data from the private company Aðstoð og öryggi ehf. The IRCA connects these data with information on traffic density on the highway system, and calculates accidents rates — i.e. rate of accidents per million km driven — from there.

The links below provide information (in Icelandic) on accident numbers on the highway system, i.e. on main, connective and country roads.