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Besides road geometry, several studies focusing on evaluating the road safety status based on specific road aspects have also been a major concern among road safety experts worldwide. Road environment is one of them. The contribution of road environment towards crash occurrences has been accepted by many researchers based on the evidence that complexity of road environment is highly related in producing high risk to drivers [1]. In general terms, road environment is defined as the road aspects related to the design and engineering elements of the road system, the safety implications of traffic and the users of that system, as well as the interaction of these components with the adjacent land use [2]. The environment of the road covers an area from the roadway itself until an area beyond the roadside during traffic operations. The environments of these areas in-whole would create exclusive road environment for every particular road area along the road network. However, the studies on the contributions of road environment aspect towards crash occurrences whether during operational period or not are quite limited. Most of the studies are only interested on roadside environment aspect only since the implication of roadside as one of the factors in producing complex road environment hence contributes to crash is already proven [3]-[5]. Although there were several studies who have taken roadside environment as their research theme, but there were only few studies focusing on evaluation of roadside environment safety status aiming to prevent crash occurrences. The implications of roadside environment in contributions to road safety status was well explored in the development of Roadside Hazard Rating [4], development of roadside hazard severity indicators [5] and production of predictive models relating crash with road environment and traffic flow [3]. In these studies, selected roadside aspects that

This study aims to develop a road safety index that combines selected road environmental characteristics in Malaysia. Firstly, 14 indicators that generally portray the Malaysian road environments were selected. Then, the final list of specific indicators for each road network was developed. The indicators were derived based on the specific criteria such as the objectives, method of measurement, quality, and expected outcomes of the indicators that may improve the overall road safety of the Malaysian trunk roads. The Malaysian Federal Road 12 was selected as the study area to assess the applicability of the theory. By employing the principal component analysis, four components were obtained and from the statistical weightage of the indicator in each component, the composite indexes were calculated. The results showed that the sections with low number of reported crashes were not necessarily safe for road users. Instead, poor road environment conditions may be highly hazardous to road users. The presence of heavy vehicles and motorcycles was found to be the main risk factor of crash occurrences on this road. Overall, the crash data may be supplemented with another proactive method in order to get a broader picture of the poor road sections.