ANALYSIS OF SERVICE AND QUALITY INDICATORS IN PUBLIC WORKS CONCESSION CONTRACTS OR HOW TO IMPROVE ROAD SAFETY BY UPGRADING QUALITY INDICATORS AND TO BE PENALISED DUE TO ROAD SAFETY INDICATORS

摘要

Road safety is one of the main goals of any action that may be undertaken, from patchingpotholes in local roads to constructing a new highway stretch. In both cases, the aim is toimprove road safety, which will benefit a higher or lower number of users depending on themagnitude of the intervention and infrastructure.The need for action will be determined by an administrative decision, generally arisingfrom a planning and development process covering a wide range of intervention, as forexample the construction of a highway stretch, or from the need to find a response to auser’s complaint or to the requirements of a local administration after supervising the stateof the road, as it can be the patching of potholes in local roads.Nevertheless, the need for action should not be determined by the occurrence of a fatalevent at a certain site without the subsequent analysis of its causes, as they might not beconnected to the condition of the road.Therefore, a series of milestones, indicators or alarms, etc. are usually established toprevent the road from being in such a bad condition that leads to a traffic accident,constituting an absolute lack of road safety.This paper analyses the case of public works concession contracts corresponding to First-Generation Highways in Spain. All kinds of public-private partnership contracts can be alsoincluded, providing that they are regulated by indicators on the road condition and qualityof service.On the one hand, indicators on the road condition and quality of service are analyzed inorder to assess how the actions implemented to improve the parameters related topavements (Sideway Force Coefficient “SFC”, International Roughness Index “IRI”, etc.),traffic signing, road marking, clearing, mowing, etc. lead to improvements in road safety.On the other side, there are those indicators strictly related to “road safety”. The analysisconducted shows that a wrong definition of these indicators leads to the impossibility tocomply with them, which surprisingly results in an opposite outcome of that actuallyobtained by the actions carried out by the concessionaire.