The International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) has announced that it is updating its leading star rating model for measuring road risks, with version 3.10 coming online from May this year on the organisation's online platform, ViDA.

Used by National Highways and highlighted in the recently published national road safety strategy, the iRAP star rating system is an important tool in modern road safety analysis. The new update has been introduced by iRAP to provide a ‘more rigorous, evidence-based framework' to protect vulnerable road users and encourage more equitable, safer transport networks. 

Developed following a five-year review of the research used to support iRaP methodologies, some of the key drivers of the update included incorporating the latest research and global evidence on crash risk, aligning risk factors and injury relationships with safe system principles, enhancing the accuracy of risk assessments, particularly for pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as motorcyclists, and ensuring assessments remain robust, repeatable and aligned with real-world injury outcomes.

Some of the key changes include: 

  • Significant changes to pedestrian and bicyclist models, including a new ‘Bicyclist Crossing' crash type.
  • Implementation of 1 km/h speed increments and 1,000 vehicle-per-lane increments for external traffic flow.
  • A consistent star rating banding system across pedestrian and bicyclist models to ensure uniform interpretation.
  • A new ‘Zero Star' band to help differentiate sections of road with extremely high risk and prioritise them for treatment.
  • A more sensitive and nuanced understanding of road safety that goes beyond traditional whole-Star thresholds.
  • New ViDA features allow users to produce Star Ratings based on operating speeds alone.

Due to the update, existing assessments using version 3.02 will not automatically update on ViDA and the new version requires a different format for data being uploaded. Due to the changes made to the bicyclists and pedestrian models, results generated by the new model should not be directly compared to those from version 3.02, iRAP said.