.jpg)
Kota Kinabalu: Sabah is moving to strengthen and standardise its Road Safety Audit (RSA) process so potential hazards are identified and addressed before road projects are completed and opened to the public.
The initiative was highlighted by Public Works Department (PWD) Senior Traffic Engineer Rafael Arthur Mojolou (pic) during his keynote address at the Borneo Empowerment in Standards and Transformation (Best) 2026 at the Sabah International Convention Centre (SICC) here recently.
Rafael said road safety should not depend solely on drivers following the rules, as road designs must also account for human error and protect vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists.
He said RSA served as a proactive check on road projects, allowing potential safety problems to be identified before they contributed to accidents.
“Road safety is not as easy as designing a structure. We have to balance many important elements before we design a road,” he said.
Rafael explained that an RSA was normally carried out by an independent third party to examine a road project from a safety perspective, including its design, road layout, visibility, speed environment and the way different users were likely to interact with the road.
He said this was important because technical standards alone could not fully determine whether a road would be safe in practice.
For example, a road passing through a village should not necessarily be designed for the same speed as a road in an open area. At the same time, the design should also consider local traffic behaviour and the presence of pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable users.
Rafael said road designers must also expect mistakes to happen and ensure that the road environment could minimise the consequences when they do.
He cited highway shoulders as one example, saying they could provide drivers with additional space to recover if they became tired or accidentally moved out of their lane.
In contrast, an open drain immediately beside a road could make an accident more serious by giving a vehicle little room to recover safely. This is what we mean by providing a forgiving environment. If there is an accident, at least the facility is forgiving to the accident,” he said.
He said the objective was to prevent an error or minor crash from resulting in serious injury, death or permanent disability.
Rafael also explained that RSA findings could sometimes require additional spending because recommended safety improvements might not have been included in the original project design or budget.
However, he said the audit provided a professional basis for identifying and justifying such improvements to the project owner or funding agency. If there is a situation that is not safe and requires improvement, the improvement requires cost. If you don’t do it, it might cause accidents,” he said.
He said the audit findings would be submitted to the relevant project authority, which would then have to consider the recommended improvements.
This would also provide a record that a particular safety concern had been identified before a project was completed.
Rafael said RSA could be carried out at different stages of a road project, from planning and initial studies to design, construction and eventual operation.
He said this allowed safety concerns to be addressed earlier, rather than waiting for accidents to occur before identifying problems.