Slovenia | School & Research

The Traffic Technical Institute is part of the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering at the University of Ljubljana. It has 13 employees and besides working with students it also works for the Municipality (traffic studies) and Ministry for Transport (traffic safety studies).

In Slovenia there are about 50 big road design offices with more than 500 employees. In the last 10 - 15 years these offices were mostly engaged through the national motorway programme in designing motorways and main roads and less with urban road design.

Since more than 60% of fatal road accidents occur on urban road networks more focus must be placed on urban street problems. It is therefore very important to educate road designers in traffic calming solutions and in modern and contemporary urban street design. There are several good projects implemented in Slovenia in the field of urban street design so we have some good examples of best practices on our roads, but it is not enough. We must also learn from European experience and we must show various possible solutions to our road designers.

In the next three years we intend to organise about 20 non- profit, free of charge workshops on traffic calming and modern road and urban road design. We plan to have about 30 to 40 participants from different road design offices in Slovenia at each workshop. We will announce this initiative at our State road congress in the city of Portorož at the end of October 2008, where we expect up to 2,000 people to participate.
Workshops will last half a day (from 9:00-12:00) and will consist of lectures and discussions on the following topics:

• traffic calming
• new design solutions in road design especially in the field of black spots
• contemporary modern road design
• contemporary modern road crossing design.

Ljubljana June 26th 2008