The “Effective and Coordinated Road Infrastructure Safety Operations” (ECOROADS) is an on-going project, which is financed by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme. Its general objective is to overcome the barrier emerging from the formal interpretation of the Road Safety and Tunnels Safety Directives that do not allow Road Safety Audits and Inspections (RSA/RSI) to be performed in uniform way along both open roads and tunnels. The project aims at the definition of an integrated approach for road infrastructure and tunnel safety management, on the basis of the existing legislative framework and the available experience of road and tunnel experts and best practices. This approach comprises the formulation of common rules of procedures for the organization, performance, reporting and evaluation of the joint road safety operations (audit and inspection) at sections consisted of both open roads and tunnels. The approach is tested and validated with pilot safety operations, which are organized at five different test sites Central and Southeast Europe and, at time being, the first two pilot actions were performed, in March and April 2016. This paper presents the ECOROADS concept, the developed common approach and the preliminary conclusions from the joint road safety operations performed at Kennedytunnel (Antwerp, Belgium) and at Krrabe tunnel (Tirana – Elbasan highway, Albania), which shall allow the fine-tuning of the procedures for the next set of field tests in Germany (Rennsteig tunnel), Serbia (Belgrade bypass, Strazevica tunnel) and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Demir Kapija tunnel) and, at a later stage, the formulation of recommendations for the incorporation of road safety operations into the tunnel safety ones.

road safety; tunnel safety; South East Europe; ECOROADS project