Road Safety Assessment of Hill Roads: A Case Study of Dehradun, Mussoorie

India has consistently ranked high in terms of road accident fatality in the last three decades despite the efforts taken to reduce them which are curative and preventive in nature. Road safety assessment is a preventive approach that is practiced in several forms around the world; out of which, the road safety audit is the recommended assessment method in India by the Indian Road Congress. The audit format provided in IRC SP 88 is a checklist meant to ensure the presence of road safety features and the recommendations for safety improvements which heavily rely on the bias or the prior experience of the road safety auditor. Some common drawbacks of the road safety audit are that the checklist for post-opening of a road is provided commonly for all roads, be it urban or rural, plain terrain, or mountainous terrain. The checklist also does not provide any ways to evaluate or quantify the safety performance of the road which makes it difficult to measure the extent of the improvement in road conditions after the changes suggested by the road safety auditor have been implemented. This paper aims to address these drawbacks by introducing a scoring technique by improving upon the current road safety audit method. The Road Safety Performance (RSP) Score which is coined in this paper is obtained chainage wise by quantifying each of the checklist parameters in the IRC SP 88. The paper also recalculates the RSP score after the treatment measures are over, to demonstrate how the scoring method helps to measure the degree of improvement post-treatment and the efficacy of the treatment measures employed.